> If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods.
Or just use the web platform: JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas API, WebGL, all of that. I think it's pretty close in terms of getting a pretty (motivating) result quickly without much prior experience.
(Unrelated, but I can also remember writing the first lines of code of my life in qbasic on a dos machine in ~1998; the blue screen definitely invokes childhood memories!)
My preferred term for this is “zero to pixels”. QB’s was very low—basically unmatched by most modern environments, which require considerably more setup; although that’s partly because they’re intended for more “serious” programming. We need more unserious, fun programming environments for beginners. :)
Over the years i made a few languages and environments for fun that included exactly that sort of low "zero to pixels" idea, mainly inspired by QBasic:
1. SimSAL Workshop [1], made years ago using a scripting language (SimSAL) i wrote at some point in Lazarus [2]. I originally wrote it because up to that point i used QBasic in DOSBox now and then to try out algorithms and i wanted something similar running natively. Although these days i tend to use Lazarus directly.
2. VitriolBASIC [3] (sadly the site i had it is down and only that image remains from archive), a simple QBasic-like interpreter written in Java. Written purely for fun, i lost interest when i realized how hard and annoying it was becoming to run Java stuff on the browser (today you cannot do that at all unless you pay the certificate mafia and even then you get tons of scary messages).
3. WinLIL [4], this is just a playground for my LIL scripting language [5] [6]... i just wanted an excuse to shove it in yet another program. But it is a single self-contained EXE file that includes the interpreter, a simple programming environment, some extra commands for graphics and all the documentation i have available :-).
Or just use the web platform: JavaScript, HTML5 Canvas API, WebGL, all of that. I think it's pretty close in terms of getting a pretty (motivating) result quickly without much prior experience.
(Unrelated, but I can also remember writing the first lines of code of my life in qbasic on a dos machine in ~1998; the blue screen definitely invokes childhood memories!)