Ooh, I love this. Somehow despite the intervening years I have found every environment I try to set up for my kids lacking compared to my early days with QuickBASIC. The combination of integrated help, a nice REPL and a simple interactive debugger is great to learn to reason about code. I’ve been quite impressed with GAMBAS, which is probably the best combination of simplicity and integration that I’ve found, not requiring constant googling or a separate tutorial, but it’s great to see something built around a language that could stick with them for years.

This is awesome! A QBASIC/QuickBASIC like environment for Python.

One thing that made QBASIC so approachable was its Help system. So easy to navigate and find the info/function/argument you needed.

As simeone who grew up with Turbo Pascal, I’d prefer the name „Turbo Python” ;)

But seriously - love the idea, congrats!

This is amazing. I just started teaching my nine year old how to code python (hes been doing scratch/block coding for a few years).

I was complaining how when I got started qbasic was perfect and there is a huge barrier to entry these days and nothing exists like qbasic.

This just hit me hard with nostalgia. Learned to program with QBASIC.

Really love the examples - I learned so much by reading the source code of games like gorillas that came with QuickBASIC.

What it really needs is graphics.

The marvelous thing about QBASIC was that you could just dive right in with PSET, LINE, CIRCLE etc, which capture the imagination in a way that "Hello World" doesn't. The only modern environment I know of that makes it that easy is Processing.

Writing graphical games, fractal viewers, cellular automata etc in QBASIC was how I got into programming AND recreational mathematics.

As a kid I used QBASIC to draw circles using for loops, and because my computer was so slow they would look animated.

This is very cool! I miss the intergity, simplicity and minimalism of Turbo Pascal.