Building my own Vi text editor in BASIC

(leetusman.com)

18 points | by zeech 1 day ago

2 comments

  • rmunn 4 minutes ago
    In BASIC? Why? Why would you do that to yourself?

    Don't get me wrong, if he enjoys writing code in BASIC, I'm not going to tell him to stop having fun. It would be silly to tell some random stranger "You're having fun wrong!" (Even if I totally think he's having fun wrong. Grin). If he's having fun with it, go for it.

    But man, I looked at the code and got flashbacks. The bad kind. BASIC was the first language I learned when I was a kid, and it's what taught me programming (because after typing "LOAD WIZARD.BAS", I could type "LIST" instead of typing "RUN" and I could actually see what the program was doing. So I learned by reading other people's code. And The Wizard's Castle was pretty good for a BASIC program: it had subroutines, a multi-dimensional map stored in a single-dimensional array (and an actual function defined to convert X,Y,Z coordinates to an index in the array!), and so on. So I am grateful to BASIC for teaching me programming.

    And I never, never, NEVER want to write another line of BASIC code again in my life.

    But if he enjoys doing so, good for him. I'll just sit here muttering under my breath "But he's still having fun wrong"... :-)

  • globalnode 1 hour ago
    cant tell if vibecoded or not, function comments seem slightly redundant, either way its a cool idea, cant wait to see the language server written in basic also :D
    • keithnz 43 minutes ago
      I vibe coded my own SQL query tui client mostly for myself, when I wanted vim editing mode, I just asked for it, and it just worked for a huge amount of common vim editing motions/actions. I did have to prompt it to add a few more when things when I noticed they were missing. Sort of makes this kind of stuff trivial. However, coding it yourself is a great mental exercise