Not sure if you already heard about Small Basic? Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language.

Small Basic is a project that's aimed at bringing "fun" back to programming. By providing a small and easy to learn programming language in a friendly and inviting development environment, Small Basic makes programming a breeze. Ideal for kids and adults alike, Small Basic helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming.

• Small Basic derives its inspiration from the original BASIC programming language, and is based on the Microsoft .Net platform. It is really small with just 15 keywords and uses minimal concepts to keep the barrier to entry as low as possible.
• The Small Basic development environment is simple, yet provides powerful modern environment features like Intellisense™ and instant context sensitive help.
• Small Basic allows third-party libraries to be plugged in with ease, making it possible for the community to extend the experience in fun and interesting ways.

You can find the download files for Small Basic at the MSDN DevLabs projects where you can find Microsoft Popfly, Pex and CHESS, too. Read more on the Small Basic blog.

4 Comments

• barry.b said Monday, November 17, 2008 3:01:44 AM

  "helps beginners take the first step into the wonderful world of programming." people not getting their jollies from VBScript? ah, the re-rise of no-nonsense dynamic languages. This is why for web programming I prefer ColdFusion. fun to use, fast results.

• Ron said Tuesday, November 18, 2008 7:32:10 PM

  Can anyone say "VB 1.0"?

• James said Friday, November 28, 2008 2:01:45 PM

  I was wondering if it's licensed for writing commercial applications or not. Does anybody know?

• Me said Friday, January 16, 2009 4:35:21 AM

  Cute and fun for some things, it has very little relationship to Basic. Closer to Visual Basic with limited capabilities. I would love to see you TRY to develop commercial applications in this "language".