I don’t see any problem in writing a compiler that compiles some BASIC dialect to Java bytecode, so I guess it’s a demand question.
Cheers! 
Something similar has been done. Baysick is a DSL in Scala(which compiles to Java bytecode) that allows you to write in BASIC (minus a bit of boilerplate at the top and bottom. Below is an example from the page.
object Lunar extends Baysick {
def main(args:Array[String]) = {
10 PRINT "Welcome to Baysick Lunar Lander v0.9"
20 LET ('dist := 100)
30 LET ('v := 1)
40 LET ('fuel := 1000)
50 LET ('mass := 1000)
60 PRINT "You are drifting towards the moon."
70 PRINT "You must decide how much fuel to burn."
80 PRINT "To accelerate enter a positive number"
90 PRINT "To decelerate a negative"
100 PRINT "Distance " % 'dist % "km, " % "Velocity " % 'v % "km/s, " % "Fuel " % 'fuel
110 INPUT 'burn
120 IF ABS('burn) <= 'fuel THEN 150
130 PRINT "You don't have that much fuel"
140 GOTO 100
150 LET ('v := 'v + 'burn * 10 / ('fuel + 'mass))
160 LET ('fuel := 'fuel - ABS('burn))
170 LET ('dist := 'dist - 'v)
180 IF 'dist > 0 THEN 100
190 PRINT "You have hit the surface"
200 IF 'v < 3 THEN 240
210 PRINT "Hit surface too fast (" % 'v % ")km/s"
220 PRINT "You Crashed!"
230 GOTO 250
240 PRINT "Well done"
250 END
RUN
}
}
I LOVE MACROS!
Oh, the gotos, they are lovely.
Looks like it predates macros – it’s a straight up old-school scala DSL. Scala macros can’t create new syntax anyway, they have to work from already parsed expressions.
Yeah painful scroll. Lovely.
55 here.
8)
At some point the whole age thing just becomes funny. What can I say, the alternative is what?
The quote about passage of time that Riven cited a while back, it is very much like what I recall reading in William James “Principles of Psychology” – a great, readable, classic text from the beginning of the 20th century. Psychology, especially cognitive psychology, took a huge step backwards when Freud came on the scene shortly after that.
Yes, I programmed in FORTH. It was fun.
I think there was a chart with the oldest listed as 53. Someone is going to have to revise it. Ah, maybe I didn’t fill out my age in the member form and that’s why it didn’t show up.
I started with QBasic at 11 years old. Years later, my crowning achievement was a 3Dish fighting game. I made a few other terrible games, but learned a lot.
Scrolling up and down sure beats opening new classes every third minute to edit or view a method.
If your class’s methods have comment, I just hover or F2.
Hello, first post here. I’m glad to see I’m not the only one in their thirties! (I just turned 30). I can relate to the OP since I work in a school, and the other day a 13 year old asked me to help him out with his 3D GTA clone. Kind of gave me a shock…
On the subject of BASIC, I started when I was 7 years old on the Spectrum 48k, writing text adventures and at one point I even attempted to make Desert Strike using redrawn font characters and loud beeps for explosions… it wasn’t particularly good.
I really cut my teeth on the Amiga where I learned Amos and then C++, made a few little 2 player competitive games and an RTS. Amos was a great thing for getting people into coding, but it also gave birth to a lot of utter nonsense!
Learned Java at Uni and did a side scrolling shooter for my dissertation. Started working on a few OpenGL games when I left uni, but somehow the game coding interest just died away and I ended up spending my time getting experience of life itself. Got a job. Travelled. Climbed a lot of mountains, met girls, drank a lot of whisky. Then realised I was 30.
I ended up downloading an amiga emulator and playing some old games the other night… which actually led me here since I fancied taking part in this year’s 4K competition. Wonder if it’ll rekindle the flame?
FORTH is awesome.
FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN
(but actually I’ve always liked the PostScript dialect more than ANS)
Ah yes I remember you are a Street Fighter player n stuff; I always loved fighters too, but when you are eventually theoretically able to program those, you realize that its like 1000 sprites per character in good 2D fighters and 3d is just different work
even street fighter 2 has a lot of sprites
So I tried some stickman fighters too.
That knowledge just lets me appreciate fighter all the much more, the amount of art and code in those games, fast paced balanced action… its just beautiful - what other game genre requires skilled players to do something at one certain frame.
EDIT: Riven, you should really put a laughing emoticon in the forum ;).
So a 29.99999% to 30.0% lower sperm fatality rate when ejaculating then? Every sperm is sacred, you know!
[/quote]
Hahahaha I can’t believe I didn’t notice that Monty Python joke:
fUspLVStPbk
16, but I’ve been into programming since I was 10 (starting ith some basic Lua) and I’ve been working with java for a little more than a year. I still have much to be desired to learn though 
But that’s an IDE feature, not a language feature. Someone could write an IDE-ish app for Basic (no doubt one actually exists) that has similar features for Basic. Hover over a goto for preview of the code there, F3 to navigate there, etc.
I do feel that layers upon layers of abstraction, and projects with 50k classes just for the sake of modularization can be considered the Java equivalent of “spaghetti code.” Maybe not quite as bad as huge blocks of code with gotos, but similar in nature at least.
37 here! Started with a very old MSX Computer (Z80 Processor) with BASIC for MSX and also Z80 machine code! Good old times that will never come back again :’(
Either get you an TI-83+ Computer (Z80 CPU) or a gameboy (Z80 as well) 