SmallBasic 0.5

I happened to notice the SmallBasic 0.5 release announcement and decided to take a look at it. The question going through my mind was, “why do we need yet another Basic programming language?”

You can download SmallBasic 0.5 via the Microsoft Download Center. Here’s the overview.

Microsoft Small Basic is a project that is aimed at making computer programming accessible to beginners. The project comprises a simple programming language that gathers inspiration from the original BASIC programming language; a modern and attractive programming environment; and rich, extensible libraries. Together they make programming fun for kids and adults alike.

After installing it, I was struck by the coolness IDE.

It’s not nearly as powerful (or even powerful looking) as Visual Studio, but it felt like I had a toy to play with. Not knowing a thing about the language, I started tying and discovered that it has a really cool intellisense dialog.

Not only is the intellisense window cool, check out that class: Flickr! It has built-in classes for popular services! I am a little disheartened to see a certain evil word, Goto, in that list.

When I started looking at this, I was wondering why we need yet another flavor of Basic. I’ve only played with the IDE and skimmed the documentation, but it did answer my question. I believe SmallBasic is more palatable to beginners and will open the doors for more people to discover the awesomeness of software development.