One important thing about QBasic that's often overlooked is that it's a community of 100% amateurs.
I learned to program in 2004 in QBasic, although I very rarely fire it up anymore. By then it was not considered a "serious" language and we all knew it. But that meant the stakes were a lot lower. It's a lot of newbies and a few old-timers who do things for fun. This makes things a lot less intimidating for the non-coder. There are no conferences, no corporate sponsors, no polarizing big-shot Twitter personalities. It's a realm surprisingly insulated from the pissing contest of modern engineering culture and technical progress, where things that are acknowledged to be easy in other languages are nonetheless praised as impressive when done in QBasic.
Another thing is that QBasic has no decent library functionality for code reuse (QB4.5 has a linker but no one knows how to use it). This means people constantly reinvent the wheel, and they aren't told not to. People copy and paste snippets of code and learn how they work, but they don't build ever more complex mashups every year. Thus, you're not on the framework treadmill or starting 5 years behind the curve. Things are done simply and idiosyncratically, pretty much the same way they were done in 1995 or 1988.
I learned to program in 2004 in QBasic, although I very rarely fire it up anymore. By then it was not considered a "serious" language and we all knew it. But that meant the stakes were a lot lower. It's a lot of newbies and a few old-timers who do things for fun. This makes things a lot less intimidating for the non-coder. There are no conferences, no corporate sponsors, no polarizing big-shot Twitter personalities. It's a realm surprisingly insulated from the pissing contest of modern engineering culture and technical progress, where things that are acknowledged to be easy in other languages are nonetheless praised as impressive when done in QBasic.
Another thing is that QBasic has no decent library functionality for code reuse (QB4.5 has a linker but no one knows how to use it). This means people constantly reinvent the wheel, and they aren't told not to. People copy and paste snippets of code and learn how they work, but they don't build ever more complex mashups every year. Thus, you're not on the framework treadmill or starting 5 years behind the curve. Things are done simply and idiosyncratically, pretty much the same way they were done in 1995 or 1988.
Makes me nostalgic just thinking about it.