SmileBASIC Releases on the North American 3DS eShop on 15th October

Meh, not my thing.

I hate to admit it, but these apps prove too much how many holes my programming skills have XD
I have no problem coding in an engine like Unity, but Petite Computer was way above my league when I tried it ^_^;;;;

@BakaKnight Yeah, this looks a little daunting.

Are the games made for the DSi version playable in this version?

To quote Edsger W. Dijkstra, programming GOD:
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
and
"I think of the company advertising "Thought Processors" or the college pretending that learning BASIC suffices or at least helps, whereas the teaching of BASIC should be rated as a criminal offence: it mutilates the mind beyond recovery."

So I wouldn't recommend this software

@Snader You do realize that when Dijkstra said that, it was in '75, right?

@Discostew
Doesn't make it any less true.

FINALLY!

I've been waiting for this FOREVER!

@Snader but you make it sound like BASIC hasn't evolved since then, no matter what form it takes. That is simply not true. But you know what people also say? That pointers are evil. Does that mean C/C++ is no longer a good language because of what some people say? Most programming languages back then were really no better. Dijkstra just wanted to take a bite out of something he personally didn't like.

@ecco6t9 Unfortunately, no. There are too many changes made to allow it. Not just from a code perspective, but also capabilities.

I like the DSi version so I'll keep my eye on this.

@Snader Now i'm not a god but as a professional programmer with over 30 years experience i have to say that is demonstrably false.

It's a maybe for me. Not that it doesn't look and sound like a great amazing tool...just with the current line up of games coming out my wallet is looking very thin.

GREAT NEWS !
Look like you will be able to upload your programs on a central server, and download other's program.
If you find Super Mario Maker too simple, you may just pick up this one and start to program in Basic.
Hopefully, we will have a European Release soon !

@TomJ : what do you think of Game Maker : Studio ? Easy for 2D games ?

@Snader
If you truly believe that, then you either aren't cut out to be a programmer or are basing your opinion on personal biases instead of facts.

SmileBASIC looks like an interesting tool to fool around with, likely with some notable limitations. It's likely not the "best" place for people to start learning to code, but almost certainly not the worst either.

This is still basically BASIC, correct? As in coding with words? As much as I'd like my kids to mess around with this, I'm not sure a keyboard based program is best suited to the stylus.

As for the BASIC sucks discussion. I'm unfamiliar with that guy or his quote, but I'll guess his context was such a bad language b/c it was so dumbed down compared to real programming languages of the time such as COBOL, FORTRAN and LISTRAN. So basically he was just snubbing his superiorly superior smug nose at BASIC and that there isn't really anything wrong w/ it, just that the guy was a smug a hole who feared young children unseating his reign. I know that's kind of how I felt in 1983 in college when my sister in 2nd grade starting learning programming in BASIC. Mostly I was just jealous she would never have to deal with stacks of punchcards. If you didn't have a stack of them on you at all times then you weren't a real programmer.

@ejamer I never said I was a programmer.

The Dijkstra comment is basically trolling- when it was originally made and when it was reposted here. This software is incredible and one of the most worthy projects on Nintendo's store. It's basically certain that this is going to turn on some young people to a new and useful skill that they wouldn't have considered before. Way to go smileboom for keeping this software going!

Well I'm going to get this and turn my brain into mush

That only took MUCH longer to come out than it needed to!

My body...errr... Mind.. Is ready. What sways me on this will be the price. Hopefully it's around 7. If so, BASIC, meet my 3DS; 3DS, meet BASIC.

Very excited for this, should it actually end up coming out in Europe. We did wait an awful long time for the DSi version.

I've been waiting forever for this! I loved Petit Computer (Most played game on my 3DS), I can't wait to get started programming in SmileBASIC, I have so many game ideas!

@Flam Gmaemaker is great, just don't expect it to not refuse to save projects because they are in the documents folder by default and occasionally corrupt itself.

hmmmmm.... pay money to use this tool which only lets me use basic (which is a kinda crappy language), OR I could just use C or C++ with some homebrew libraries and make apps that can do a lot more.Tough one.

"Purchase Additional Features"? (second box down in the right column of the pic) I'll have to see. All the same, glad this is finally seeing a release in North America.

I think it's much easier to learn programming online through websites and YouTube tutorials. The amount of information is nearly endless and it's obviously free. I shouldn't talk much, though, since I'm paying over 100 grand at college for it. 😁

@TerrapinJess
According to the Nintendo site, it's going to be $9.99 on release. Maybe that will change... but it seems like a safe bet right now.

@Monado_III
Using C or C++ is more complicated and requires you to have special hardware (and a PC to develop on) before seeing your programs run on a 3DS. Not saying it's a bad choice - obviously you get more power and flexibility, but SmileBASIC has a different set of benefits (and limitations) that make it a better choice for many people.

@wiggleronacid
I tend to agree - diving directly into Petit Computer (the old DSiWare version) was tough and sometimes discouraging for some people who didn't have any background with coding.

That said, there were pretty good communities here and at GameFAQs (and maybe elsewhere) to help if you were still figuring things out. Hopefully SmileBASIC will see the same grassroots support.

Finally...

I can't wait~

@Snader
That was when BASIC was a lot like FORTRAN: difficult to learn, and difficult to maintain code. Thankfully BASIC has changed, and so has FORTRAN. They're much more usable now and more like other languages.
Although Python is certainly a better choice for teaching beginners!

YEAHHHHHHHHH!!! I`ve been waiting years for this app.

Nooo! I've been waiting for ages...but I lost interest because of 3ds homebrew availability...

If it has good capabilities, I'd love to pick this up. I've been programming professionally for 30 years, and I'd love to port a couple of old games like M.U.L.E. to the 3DS.

It's about time! I haven't heard anything about this for ages!

As for BASIC itself, while it does have some limitations and can teach some bad habits (most notably the GOTO command), there are also some very convenient features that I wish would be adopted by some other languages, such as automatically parsing the end of statements through context rather than needing ending punctuation, starting arrays at the much more logical one rather than zero, or the simpler number rounding and data type conversion functions.

@BulbasaurusRex
I'm pretty sure arrays still start at zero.

@chiefeagle02 The additional features are likely to refer to the ability to expand your upload capacity, just like Pokebank. I heard the Japanese version offers up to 100 upload allowances if you charge 100 yen for 1 mo or 500 yen for 6 mo (compared to 10 without this fee), and each file can be up to 20MB instead of 4MB. I guess it isn't about additional functions, just the available capacity.

@BulbasaurusRex I love this explanation as to why it is better for arrays to start from 0.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-array-indexes-start-with-0-zero-in-many-programming-languages

@Francis333 They don't in QBasic at least.

@HADAA While that link explains why it makes the coding a little more efficient in some cases (although the first case can be accommodated by a rounding up function), I'd gladly trade the little extra memory used to think through the math logically rather than constantly needing to adjust my mental calculations.

@ejamer @rjejr @TTGlider @Snader @Monado_III @BulbasaurusRex
Dijkstra (dike-struh) is full of wisdom about programming and was influential throughout early programming and impressive in his insight but it does indeed matter that he was commenting at a different time. I'm not familiar with SmileBASIC but it may in fact have some structure to it that leads to poor programming practice like every programming language I've come across.

I know just what he means in this situation as well because I was responsible for quite a few hundred lines of "spaghetti" code with insane goto statements and indecipherable logic following the bits and pieces of BASIC I knew as a kid.

That said, the best way to start programming is using whatever language you need to make what you are passionate about. Learning programming often takes intense dedication and perseverance — especially compared to other areas of study that you've had foundational incidental teaching on since before you could talk.

If you think you might be interested in programming and this context excites you, I say go for it.

It's a lot easier than punch cards (I just missed that in high school! whew! Sorry, @rjejr) and once you've learned the foundational concepts you can apply your learning to other languages quite easily.

@BulbasaurusRex Arrays starting at zero is the right thing for so many reasons. That link is okay, but the article is less useful than the comments below it which offer a pile of valid reasons for starting at zero.

Another natural mathematical pattern it matches up with is the repeating results of division remainders — performed by the modulo operator (%) in programming. The number you divide another by will always give you a remainder of zero leading up to that number -1. You can use this in many ways and indexing that into an array without any additional math is just one more example.

It's easier to train your brain to start counting at zero than do all the backtracking you'll need when starting with 1. In fact, it's likely you've already trained your brain for this. When you roll a die in a simple board game to to move your pawn, do you count the first space you are on as one? No, that's zero spaces away. One is the next space over. Just like arrays.

Sorry, I teach programming courses.

@aaronsullivan The best thing about using punch cards in high school was that my freshman year of college was the year the college went away from them. When I was touring colleges and they told me that I was pretty much sold for that reason alone on the spot.

@rjejr Haha. In high school I used bunch of terminals hooked up to a VAX minicomputer. (Funny, that term minicomputer.)

@aaronsullivan Mini, as in - it's about the size of a Mini Cooper.

I was BSing my kids in the car yesterday, telling them Microsoft was named b/c they made software, compared to hardware, they really didn't get the "software" part, and they were "micro" b/c they didn't make software for real computers like ENIAC. Sounded good.

@rjejr
Now, you went and made me look it up:
https://www.quora.com/How-did-Bill-Gates-choose-the-name-Microsoft

I would have guessed it was based on "microcomputers", too, as they wanted to make software for those types of new home computers that were coming, but actually it's based on micro processors and it was Paul Allen that had the notion that there would be large number of computers that would need programming languages (software) ported to different processors. While pretty prescient the big break for them was going to be more about the operating system and they happened into that almost by accident. They were really the first software company, though.

@aaronsullivan Um, that was the very first example on the page, and like I said is easily compensated for with a ceiling function.

Everything else in life (except British lifts and bitmap coordinates, which I also wish would change) has the human mind count starting at one, so you wouldn't want to retrain it that way even if you could. In your board game example, why would you recount the space you're already on? You start by moving to the next space and count starting at one.

@aaronsullivan Thanks for the link, I'm going to have my kids read it later. Well at least try to. And I think I was close enough, I'll just tell them I misremembered the micro part.

"Microsoft Basic and Microsoft Fortran"

Well that explains why that guy thought BASIC sucked.

@BulbasaurusRex
Yeah the example is really similar. I was trying to suggest how useful mod is beyond hash tables, but I fell right into the exact example for brevity's sake.

There's also pointer math, converting numbers to cycles (also mod). Math in general needs zeros and converting numbers to data works best when that zero is acknowledged.

Well, maybe the more academic explanation would work better for you and Dijkstra's note on this is well constructed if a little inscrutable at first.

There are many ways to train yourself and few reasons not to. When you were born how many years old were you? But it was your "first" year. There's a disconnect there that you probably understand just fine but you are resistant to accept with arrays and counting distances in programming.

As mentioned in those comments ancient mathmeticians made the huge mistake of ignoring zero. Number lines of -2, -1, 1, 2, 3, 4 and such.

Certainly you can work around what has been accepted into the computing sciences but that's a constant battle vs. a one time perspective-shift.

@aaronsullivan Off topic - just bought the Rise of the Empire set (hey, I remembered the name) at Target. My kid is buying DI 3.0 on Wii U w/ a $10 eShopcard and his allowance, and I owe him $5 from Legend of Kay that I used b/c it was in the Wii U account and I forgot it was his. Target sucked me in w/ 40% off on Cartwheel so it was $21 for Luke and Leia my favorite sci-fi brother and sister - ugly as sin though - minus my 5% Red card made it an even $20, figured it was worth that for the toys, even if I've read they took some liberties w/ the trilogy. Oh, and I bought a Spaltoon water pistol for $1.48, so now I feel bad. I had to though, both Wii U stickers on the sides were upside down, so it's a NiiM. I'm going to open yours and actually play w/ it now.

@Captain_Gonru also off topic, but on subject - that Wii Fit Meter was finally $5.98 - though still stickered for $9.98 - so I finally picked that up for my wife as well. Hopefully she won't lose this one, I feel like I'm setting a bad example for the kids by replacing something she lost.

Missed that Cartwheel deal. That's a great one. You really don't like the look of the Star Wars figurines? I think they are great caricatures. Just think of them as on the cover of the New Yorker or something. My kids are really starting to get into Star Wars and want those DI figures now. Anticipation growing.

Yes, they will certainly take liberties. The premise of DI is that they are all Toys in a big toy box. Even when it comes to the play sets, really, and it looks like they take it quite literally at times.

Did they finally get the water guns and put them on a shelf? They were selling the Mario Maker rubik's cubes on a shelf at a Target I saw for at least a few bucks. I'm not sure how that works: "Our workers didn't do their job giving these away as promotions to people who deserved them so we are going to sell them instead". Yah.

@Captain_Gonru um, maybe I should have mentioned my kids were with me while I was shopping.

@aaronsullivan Cartwheel deal is good thru Saturday, though I think it's only good on the new playsets. I was going to sleep on it, but with only 1 on the shelf I couldn't leave it there.

Water pistols were labeled $4.99 they put them out when they got a bunch in a little while back. I only saw the rubies cube 3 days before it came out.

gotta go, first pitch, somebody might get hurt, or not

@rjejr Cool. Thanks for the tip on Cartwheel. Too bad they don't carry the Twilight of the Republic in stock at my Targets (any?) I'd have to order. Instead, I looked on Amazon and that one's selling for $25 (instead of $35) probably because most people don't need it and it just looks like it needs to move compared to the others. Ka-ching!

3 releases now. DI is never-buy-retail-price kinda thing.

Hard to hold on to these until the big day... all my video game shopping is done, though, I think — like you, I pre-ordered yoshi with the amiibo just to be sure.

@aaronsullivan I've had a $90 dark Skylanders box hidden away since launch, thanks to $10 off w/ Amazon Prime, and Yoshi is coming Friday and that was supposed to be under the tree but I think I'm just giving it to my kid for his bar mitzvah Sat, makes sense as it's a SSB theme and he plays a lot as Yoshi. Not sure why, he's always rolling the egg off the edge, but it's his tournament money, not mine, so as long as he's having fun. The 10GB DI 3.0 took over 3 hours to DL and install, started at 6:20, finished at 9:30. The patch went lickety split.

Thanks for the TotR info, I didn't even know that was a thing, my kid wants Oshoku but I told him it wasn't worth $65 for the set when we can DL the toy box for $20. I'll keep an eye on it, bound to hit $17.49 around the holidays, half price. Maybe I can pick it up on a deal w/ Toy Box Takeover. Or Marvel Battleground in March.

Good thing I wasn't planning on getting a PS4 this year, these toys are getting expensive, havne't even started on Lego D yet, need somebi gtime sales there just to get me started, and already bought myself XCX colelctors edition so thats it for me for the holidays. Though a Lego Dr Who or Dalek could find itself into my stocking.

@aaronsullivan Well, sure zero is important as a placeholder and when dealing with both positive and negative numbers, but that's not the same as counting, which is the basis of arrays. (Ironically, there actually isn't a year zero on the Julian/Gregorian Calendar, as it goes from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D. in order to keep the centuries and millennia straight with 100-1 B.C. and 1-100 A.D. counting as their respective first centuries. Even Doc Brown screwed that one up when he programmed his time circuits, not that Jesus was actually born on Dec. 25 in the first place.) Almost every real life counting example starts with one with zero as just the starting point. Sure, when you're born you're zero years old, but that's once again just the starting point when counting years of life (during which time a baby's age is counted in months or days). Nobody cares about cardinal representations of age, and it's annoying when people refer to their age in that super formal way, because nobody knows if they're referring to their actual age or the logical interpretation of one fewer, a lot like how confusing arrays are when they start counting at zero

@Captain_Gonru I know you need to save all your money to buy blind packs of cards for games you have no intention of playing. And I'm sure your aware Aarron and I spend a lot of money on our kids, don't think either of us would spend so much money on toys for ourselves, but yeah it is expensive. But you know what, and I compeltely understand why "gamers" don't get this - all kids toys are expensive, whether they come to life in games or not, and kids, especially boys, need to get toys for gifts, and spend their money on toys. We have so many expensive Lego sets, and Pokemon figures, and the nearly complete Planet Heroes set. We buy toys. 80 Skylanders, but they play w/ them like toys, hence all the broken body parts, part of playing.

This isn't ours, we have more characters than that plus everythig in the pic.

BTW, wasn't calling you a gamer, just other gamers

@Captain_Gonru "I'm going to have a kid of my own. And I'm going to be forced to learn to share"

I was just showing my kids my wife's Star Wars toy collection from the 80's. They are still in the "Space case". I put them back before she got home from work. I may post a pic later, it's a nice collection, and they all look better than the DI toys.

I think I stopped collecting Marvel comics in part due to all the X-overs, and summer bi-weeklies, and price increases, it was all getting to be too much. Secret Wars opened the floodgates and they never closed.

If someone was able to recreate MegaMan 2 in Petit Computer, I can't imagine the fun I may have in this just playing other people's stuff alone. Also, I can't wait for the new online publishing in this. Scanning 200 QR codes on that crappy DSi camera was HELL.

@BulbasaurusRex The amount of discussion we've generated on this issue has already surpassed its importance to learning programming. It matters so little, really. Deal with it how you must, after teaching it for going on 15 years I've found that students who accept the starting at zero tend to grasp everything better than those who fight it. That said, everyone learns differently.

I only ask (with levity) that you please don't make a language that starts arrays with an index of 1 by default. Go the pascal route and make it adjustable if you must, but the reasons for 0 are well-established and we need less noise in that space honestly — or prove the establishment wrong with science.

@rjejr Man, wish I'd seen this post. The kids did a great job cleaning up the house this weekend so we decided to reward them with DI 3.0 and "Rise" after school today, the download and then installation took soooooo long. They were playing past their bed time, but totally ecstatic about it.

@aaronsullivan So it wasn't just my loudly grinding external HDD then that was slowing up the process? Every time I load the game it takes so long as well, but I'm blaming that on USB 2.0.

Spent about an hour last night in the hub - didn't want to do too much w/ Tonto as I want to level up Luke, haven't opened the playset yet, saving that for our anniversary tomorrow - and it really seems a step up. I may spend a lot of hours just futzing around in there. 2nd gift I got was on top of a building in Main St., took me 10 minutes to find it and I didn't know how to get up there after I saw it. Had to throw on the Toy Story booster. Jet pack didn't work too well as I smashed Tonto's head into a wall.

Is the first version that lets us play online w/ others? I saw @sinalefa name pop up, didn't have to put in a code or anything, it was just there. And it even carried over my DI name and password, I'm guessing from DI 1.0, which is also on the Wii U, DI 2.0 is on the PS3, go figure. DI 4.0 will probably be either on NX or PS4 I guess. At this point might as well just accept the fact we're getting it, ugly toys and all. Maybe 4.0 will finally get a Disney focus, those Princesses aren't going to put up w/ being left out forever, they'll go on strike.

So, what are the kids getting for Christmas now that the house is so clean?

@Captain_Gonru Maybe you could just rent some kids to share all your goodies with? Make sure they wear surgeons gloves though. Sorry about your brothers comic collection, I sold a lot of mine on my parents front steps for like 5c each to the kids down the block. They did sell me some of theirs though too. You know, back in the days when kids actually went outside. Every house in my neighborhood has kids, but nobody is ever outside. It's depressing.

@aaronsullivan I'd rather just write a macro in C++ that creates a function called DIM that declares an array that automatically adds one to the number of elements along with a second argument to determine the data type needed. That way I can just avoid using the zero index without thinking about it, while I'm not forcing it on anyone else.

@BulbasaurusRex Only problem is that anyone who has to work with your code will now have a "what's going on here?" moment that slows them down. Plus, you are going to have to convert your array to pass it to any function written by almost anyone else. It's not that bad in C and C++ but it adds little extra steps everywhere that may be fine for you but others who have simply accepted how arrays work will have to stop and consider when coming across your code in the future.

@Monado_III So you could hack your 3ds to use C++ which is harder to use, or you could do it in a much easier to use way by using something officially available. Tough choice indeed