In this week's Get Illuminated podcast with Rudy Rucker, we talked about the good old days of using BASIC to write programs to experiment with chaos and artificial life. I remember going through Rudy's manual for James Gliek's Chaos: The Software and using Rudy's descriptions of how his programs worked to write my own versions using QuickBASIC. I also liked A.K. Dewdney's "Computer Recreation" columns from Scientic American, his book The Magic Machine, and his long defunct newsletter Algorithm (I'm sorry I no longer have my back issues).
In the podcast, I asked Rudy why it's not as popular as it once was to do recreational programming. His answer was along the lines of "The Web sort of killed it." I think he's right.
But I got an encouraging note from a Boing Boing reader named Wendell, who says:
The mention of QuickBasic and the like toward the end caught my attention since I've enjoyed playing around with BASIC flavors since the 80s. There still exists a hobbyist scene for several modern flavors, including some with easy-to-use 3D graphics. Blitz3D and BlitzMax are my own choices, though DarkBasic also has a following. While the main emphasis is on making "mainstream" games with them, it's certainly easy to do weird (i.e. more-interesting) 2D & 3D things with them.
Here's some of Rudy's software: Link