I used to do all my programming in QBasic under MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.22. Those two languages are pretty decent, especially if as with all languages a certain amount discipline and skill is applied. Although I have never tried it with QBasic I know from programming in Quick Basic 4.5 (which I got my hands on after I started with QBasic) you can do some pretty advanced stuff using interrupt calls and machine language snippets. Visual Basic for MS-DOS offers a few nice features, the only really useful feature however (IMHO) that can't be imitated in Q(uick Basic) is mandatory variable declaration. I have tried but could never really get into Turbo Pascal, C or C++. I have written a few things in assembly language as well. Debug is useful for small projects in that regard. I have written a lot of stuff with Visual Basic 3.0 and later Visual Basic 5.0 and 6.0. I probably used some other stuff I can't remember right now. EDIT: I just remember messing with Microsoft BASIC, GW-Basic and Commodore BASIC. As for the first two, unless you need to write something for CP/M forget about Microsoft BASIC and use Q(uick) Basic. As to GW-Basic, it may have been nice for its time, but Q(uick Basic) runs just as fine on older CPU's and MS-DOS and is vastly superior imho. Only ever having occassionally used someone else's Commodore I don't have much to say about programming on that.
And recently I got it into my head I should try to convert a book keeping program I wrote in Q(uick Basic) to vb.net. Why? Because I am kind of a fascinated by how you do a lot of pretty advanced stuff with a few lines of code in vb.net where you needed an entire convoluted procedure in Q(uick Basic) mostly. My bookkeeping program (a rudimentary spreadsheet/database thingy I made in an attempt to provide a small student run candy store with a means of keeping track of their finances) seemed like a good candidate for this comparisson.
If anyone hasn't figured it out yet, I have written tons of stuff in all kinds mosly BASIC related dialects. I could probably write a few more paragraphs if I felt like it ... and had the time. 😉
EDIT
I also tried reverse engineering old software, with limited success.
EDIT 2:
I decided trying to prove to myself that vb.net's data handling capacities are superior by converting and entire decades old QBasic program is going too far. While a lot can be converted relatively easily, some elements such printing would require some rather convoluted coding. Also, I forgot how much I learned about programming. The QBasic code is not awful but it could use a lot of improvement. That and I have successfully made pretty much identical programs in vb.net and QBasic. Perhaps a small data handling example would be interesting to do. Anyone got an interesting idea that's not too hard to do? QBasic vs vb.net?
Do not read if you don't like attention seeking self-advertisements!
Did you read it anyway? Well, you can find all sorts of stuff I made using various programming languages over here:
https://github.com/peterswinkels