The author also wrote about his experience making a space shooter game for the E-Reader:

https://mattgreer.dev/blog/making-a-shooter-for-the-ereader/

This is what I need more of from the internet.

TinyBASIC is fun and beautifully simple. I wrote a 3-part tutorial for making a TinyBASIC-to-C compiler using Python a few years ago.

Let’s make a Teeny Tiny compiler https://austinhenley.com/blog/teenytinycompiler1.html

I know BASIC is kind of a “bad” language, but there’s something so delightful about it. If we’re plugging TinyBASIC projects that others might find interesting, I made an MMO TinyBASIC REPL the other day: http://10klob.com/

People too often complain about original BASIC, and forget most dialects moved away from line numbers and spaghetti GOTOs during the 16 bit days, with widepsread of compilers and structured constructs.

I am really glad that I only got to learn C, after getting through Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, Turbo Pascal[0], doing exactly the same kind of stuff urban myths say it was only possible after C came to be.

[0] - On 16 bit systems, I started coding on an 8bit Timex 2068.

BASIC is an amazing language that computing novices (including humanities majors) could learn in an afternoon, that could be efficiently compiled or compactly interpreted, that was small enough to support dozens of interactive users on a mainframe or minicomputer, or to fit into a tiny 8-bit microcomputer – and yet was largely equivalent to FORTRAN in terms of its expressive power.

I think the closest modern equivalents might be Python (for easy onramp and scalability from microcontrollers to supercomputers) and JavaScript (for pure ubiquity in every device with a web browser.)

I wonder if there is a modern-ish (?) environment that can match Visual BASIC in terms of easy GUI app programming. Perhaps Python or Tcl with Tk (Qt seems harder) or maybe Delphi, or perhaps a modern Smalltalk.

Delphi for sure. And while you have to run it on Windows, it can create binaries for Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile.

https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphi

FreePascal and Lazarus get you close on other platforms I think. It’s been ages since I’ve looked into it.

Yes, but I'd argue the price of Delphi is totally worth the issues you would then avoid by not using Lazarus.

I thought Lazarus/FreePascal are 100% compatible with Delphi. Is that not the case?

Well this afternoon bit...

Advanced BASICs are too big for that, and in less advanced ones you get to POKE the hardware to do certain things. Which means you get to learn a bunch of hardware and machine code. That's not all bad though!

Delphi, and naturally Visual Basic for .NET with Windows Forms, not forgeting about C#, however it is getting a bit too much featurities lately, and most likely not what the BASIC target audience would like.

What I like about these projects is that you can make them as simple or as complicated as you want.

I agree 100%.

Here’s why I prefer making “useless” stuff: https://austinhenley.com/blog/makinguselessstuff.html

And my list of similar projects: https://austinhenley.com/blog/challengingprojects.html

I want to do a database and then something involving genetic algorithms next. If I have infinite time, another video game emulator too.

I had implemented some computer games in DOS.

I had wanted to implement a spreadsheet, although I intended a "zoned spreadsheet", which has a zone grid (separate from the data grid), and each zone row has a number of data rows and each zone column has a number of data columns, and some properties are then properties of zone cells and others are properties of data cells. I think this would be better than most existing spreadsheet programs.

I did not know of some of the things that are mentioned there.

Thank you for sharing these! I've been looking for something productive to do over the summer. Why not make some "useless" stuff, huh?

This is beautiful!!! Adding it to the end of the post right now.

Now if I can just use SIMD directly from Python without calling out to another language.

Hi Austin! Was just checking your blog and the vowels detection post (< https://austinhenley.com/blog/vowels.html>).

What exactly do you mean by “use SIMD directly without calling out to another language”?

In some way Assembly will probably anyways be another language… but that’s a technicality.

I guess the spectrum of SIMD-related work in relation to Python is quite broad. There are projects like PeachPy, to help one write x86 Asm in Python, new Python’esque languages like Mojo, or SIMD libraries with thin CPython bindings. Do you mean one of those?

PS: I’m in the last camp. And in case you are focused on ASCII, for vowel search, have you tried StringZilla’s `find_first_of` (< https://github.com/ashvardanian/StringZilla/blob/960967d78c7...>)? I think it should perform well ;)

why would you want to? if you are performance bound with Python code, you can pick up a 20-50x performance improvement by switching language.

Right, but if there's only a small portion of my code that does string search and it's a hot path, it would still be much much much more convenient to access SIMD-based string search code direct from Python rather than writing the code (LLM or not) in another language and then construct bindings (LLM or not).

2 problems.

1. Python's data types are all bad for performance

2. once you optimize once part, a new part will be the bottleneck

You can use cython and call C SIMD code from it.

Try Nim. It's pretty easy to get the hang of it for simple things, and you can make a python module too.

We are hiring.

Very nice find (pun intended). I added an update at the end with your solution and a link to this comment.

YouTuber or move to the mountains.