# QBasic

27 Hacker News commenters recommended QBasic and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 11 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a self-contained, friendly BASIC programming environment with excellent built-in help, and as a first language for learning. Critics mainly note that the code it produced was often poor.

## Why people recommend it

- Nostalgic memories from childhood use (7 comments): "Basic and Qbasic represent a part of computer culture that has been lost a little bit" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49293291)) "It was just wonderful. I owe so much to that thoughtful feature as a child." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49960133)) "As one of those kids who spent the early 90s in QBasic, thank you!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49290482))
- Excellent built-in help and documentation (6 comments): "Retrocomputing with something like QBASIC is an obvious example, since it comes with a complete hypertext manual" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45928907)) "relatively friendly IDE that had built‑in help for every single command" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49291613)) "QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49852850))
- Educational first language for learning (4 comments): "how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857267)) "Reverse engineering how they worked gave a lot of the core concepts (variables, loops, procedures)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46453010)) "That was my first programming language, taught in 10th grade intro to programming. I loved it!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46556793))
- Self-contained, no-install environment (4 comments): "The old editor for DOS 6.22 was actually provided by qbasic.exe, which had the editor and a full BASIC interpreter packed in 250kB." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47158722)) "One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else's." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830399)) "It's a completely self-contained sandbox of possibilities." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49294491))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [HyperCard](https://hackerapproved.com/p/hypercard.md): 62 recommend
- [QuickBASIC](https://hackerapproved.com/p/quickbasic.md): 8 recommend
- [Folk Computer](https://hackerapproved.com/p/folk-computer.md): 6 recommend
- [Glamorous Toolkit](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glamorous-toolkit.md): 6 recommend
- [DrRacket](https://hackerapproved.com/p/drracket.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "QBasic", https://hackerapproved.com/p/qbasic/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).