BASIC, Smalltalk Variants & Teaching Languages — Tier 3 Index
BASIC, Smalltalk Variants & Teaching Languages — Tier 3 Index
- Type: Family index (encyclopedic)
- Family: BASIC dialects, Smalltalk variants, and teaching / visual / pedagogical languages
- Languages catalogued: ~30 across three sub-families
- Last updated: 2026-05-07
Family overview
This index covers three intertwined traditions that share a common thesis: programming should be approachable. The BASIC family (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, 1964) democratized computing by putting an interpreter on every home microcomputer in the 1980s and later evolved into Microsoft’s Visual Basic empire — VBA still ships in every copy of Microsoft Office and remains the world’s most-deployed programming language by install count. The Smalltalk lineage (Xerox PARC, 1972) pioneered pure object-orientation, live image-based development, and the modern GUI; its descendants (Squeak, Pharo, Self, Newspeak) continue to influence dynamic-language design decades later. The teaching/visual branch (Logo, Scratch, Snap!, Alice) descends from Seymour Papert’s constructionist learning theory and now reaches tens of millions of K-12 students worldwide via block-based environments.
In our deep library
- smalltalk — the canonical pure-OO image-based language; covers Pharo, Squeak history, syntax, message-sends
- pascal — Wirth’s teaching language that grew into Delphi/Object Pascal; included here as it shares the pedagogical lineage
Tier 3 — the family
BASIC dialects
| Language | First release | Status (2026) | Niche / use case | Why it matters | Source URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Basic 6 (VB6) | 1998 | Extended support indefinitely; “it just works” mode | Legacy line-of-business Windows apps; massive enterprise install base refusing to migrate | Microsoft has committed to runtime support on Windows 11 and beyond; estimated millions of LOB apps still in production | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/visualstudio/visual-basic-6/ |
| VB.NET | 2002 | Maintenance only; no new language features since 2020 | .NET legacy code, conversions from VB6, government/enterprise apps | Microsoft officially stopped co-evolving VB.NET with C# in 2020; existing code keeps working but C# is the future | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/visual-basic-support-planned-for-net-5-0/ |
| VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) | 1993 | Active; ships in Microsoft 365 | Office automation, Excel macros, Access apps; finance/accounting backbone | The most-deployed programming runtime on Earth by install count; Microsoft’s “Office Scripts” (TypeScript) is the long-horizon successor but VBA isn’t going anywhere | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/overview/ |
| VBScript | 1996 | Deprecated; removal in progress 2024-2027 | Legacy IE-era web pages, Windows admin scripts, classic ASP | Microsoft began removing VBScript from Windows 11 24H2 (2024); fully removed by ~2027. PowerShell is the replacement | https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/whats-new/deprecated-features |
| QuickBASIC / QBasic | 1985 / 1991 | Archived; runs in DOSBox | DOS-era teaching, nostalgic hobbyist projects | Bundled with MS-DOS 5.0+ and Windows 95; many programmers’ first language. QB64 keeps it alive on modern OSes | https://qb64.com/ |
| QB64 / QB64-PE | 2008 | Active community fork | Modern QBasic-compatible compiler; cross-platform | Compiles QuickBASIC source to native code on Windows/macOS/Linux; lifeline for legacy QB code | https://qb64phoenix.com/ |
| FreeBASIC | 2004 | Active; community | Open-source compiled BASIC; QB-syntax-compatible plus modern features (OOP, pointers) | The most full-featured open-source BASIC compiler; used for retro-style game dev and demoscene | https://www.freebasic.net/ |
| PureBasic | 1998 (Fantaisie Software) | Active; commercial | Cross-platform compiled BASIC with native binaries; small user base but loyal | Single executable output, no runtime; used by indie devs valuing simplicity | https://www.purebasic.com/ |
| BlitzBasic / Blitz3D | 2000 / 2001 | Open-sourced 2014; legacy | 2D/3D game development for hobbyists | Many indie devs of the early 2000s started here; now superseded by Unity/Godot but Blitz3D source is on GitHub | https://github.com/blitz-research/blitz3d |
| BlitzMax / BlitzMax NG | 2004 / 2015 (NG fork) | Active community fork (NG) | Modern OO BASIC for game dev; cross-platform | NG fork keeps it alive; small but dedicated user base | https://blitzmax.org/ |
| Gambas | 1999 | Active; Linux-focused | Linux-native BASIC IDE/runtime; “VB6 for Linux” | The closest open-source spiritual successor to VB6 on Linux; ships in many distro repos | https://gambas.sourceforge.net/ |
| Just BASIC / Liberty BASIC | 2001 / 1991 | Liberty BASIC active; Just BASIC freeware | Beginner-friendly Windows BASIC | Liberty BASIC has been a teaching staple for 30+ years; Just BASIC is the free subset | https://www.libertybasic.com/ |
| BASIC-256 | 2007 | Active; maintained for education | Children’s BASIC with built-in turtle graphics, sound, and database | Designed explicitly for ages 8-14; used in schools and home-education curricula | https://basic256.org/ |
| SmallBASIC | 1999 | Active; small community | Embedded/portable BASIC for desktop and Android | Tiny footprint; runs on phones; suitable for quick scripts | https://smallbasic.github.io/ |
| Microsoft Small Basic | 2008 | Maintenance; v1.3 from 2019 | Children’s BASIC from Microsoft DevLabs; 14-keyword core | Designed as a stepping stone to Visual Basic; the modern Microsoft answer to BASIC pedagogy | https://smallbasic-publicwebsite.azurewebsites.net/ |
| Atari BASIC | 1979 | Historical; runs in emulators | Atari 400/800 home-computer BASIC | Computing-history artifact; many ’80s programmers’ first language | https://www.atariarchives.org/ |
| Commodore BASIC (CBM BASIC) | 1977 | Historical | C64, VIC-20, PET BASIC | The most widely shipped BASIC of the 8-bit era; ROM-resident and instantly available | https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/BASIC |
| Sinclair BASIC | 1980 | Historical | ZX80/81/Spectrum BASIC | UK home-computing pillar; introduced a generation of British programmers | https://worldofspectrum.org/ |
| Applesoft BASIC | 1977 | Historical | Apple II series | Microsoft-licensed BASIC for Apple II; the BASIC for one of personal computing’s foundational platforms | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC |
| BBC BASIC | 1981 | Active fork (BBC BASIC for Windows / SDL) | BBC Micro educational computer; structured BASIC | Considered one of the best BASIC dialects for its structured-programming features; still has active users | https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/ |
Smalltalk variants beyond the deep note
| Language | First release | Status (2026) | Niche / use case | Why it matters | Source URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Squeak | 1996 | Active; community-maintained | Open-source Smalltalk-80 implementation; education and research | Direct ancestor of Pharo and Etoys; built by original Smalltalk-80 authors (Kay, Ingalls) | https://squeak.org/ |
| Cuis Smalltalk | 2004 | Active; small dedicated community | Minimalist Squeak fork emphasizing a small, clean kernel | Curated to stay around 600 classes vs Squeak’s thousands; design philosophy of radical simplicity | https://cuis.st/ |
| Newspeak | 2008 | Research-active | Module-based, “deeply modular” Smalltalk descendant by Gilad Bracha | Influenced modern dependency injection patterns; explores nested classes and modularity | https://newspeaklanguage.org/ |
| Self | 1987 | Research; archived but downloadable | Prototype-based OO ancestor of JavaScript | Pioneered prototypes-without-classes; its VM techniques became the basis for V8 and HotSpot | https://selflanguage.org/ |
| Strongtalk | 1996 | Open-sourced 2006 | Smalltalk with optional pluggable static types | Sun acquired Strongtalk in 1997 and its VM became the seed of HotSpot JVM; type system was decades ahead | https://www.strongtalk.org/ |
| VAST (VA Smalltalk) | 1993 (as IBM VisualAge) | Active; commercial (Instantiations) | Banking, insurance, enterprise legacy systems | Spun off from IBM VisualAge in 2005; still selling licenses and supporting Wall Street institutions | https://www.instantiations.com/products/vasmalltalk/ |
| GemStone/S | 1986 | Active; commercial | Persistent object database for Smalltalk; transactional OODB | Used in financial trading systems where Smalltalk objects need ACID persistence at scale | https://gemtalksystems.com/products/gs64/ |
| Etoys | 2001 | Education; bundled with Sugar (OLPC) | Squeak-based scripting environment for kids (Alan Kay’s vision) | Shipped on every One Laptop Per Child XO; pioneered child-accessible programming environments | http://www.squeakland.org/ |
| Dolphin Smalltalk | 1995 | Open-sourced 2016 | Windows-only Smalltalk IDE | Now MIT-licensed on GitHub; small community of Windows-focused Smalltalkers | https://github.com/dolphinsmalltalk/Dolphin |
| Cincom VisualWorks | 1992 (ParcPlace) | Active; commercial | Cross-platform commercial Smalltalk; large-scale production deployments | One of the original ParcPlace-Digitalk lineage products; used at major insurers and JPMorgan-class banks | https://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/ |
Teaching, visual & block-based languages
| Language | First release | Status (2026) | Niche / use case | Why it matters | Source URL |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Logo | 1967 | Historical; many active descendants | Turtle graphics; Papert’s “math-land” for kids | The original constructionist programming language; its turtle is the ancestor of every block-based environment | https://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/ |
| Scratch | 2007 (1.0); Scratch 3.0 in 2019 | Massively active; MIT | Block-based programming for ages 8-16; 100M+ accounts | The dominant K-12 programming environment globally; runs in any browser; translated to 70+ languages | https://scratch.mit.edu/ |
| Snap! | 2011 | Active; UC Berkeley | Scratch successor with first-class procedures, lists, and continuations | ”Build Your Own Blocks” — adds the abstractions Scratch deliberately omits; used in UC Berkeley’s intro CS course | https://snap.berkeley.edu/ |
| Blockly | 2012 | Active; Google | JS/Python/Lua code-generating block library used as a DSL framework | The substrate underneath many other block environments (App Inventor, Code.org’s Hour of Code, etc.) | https://developers.google.com/blockly |
| MIT App Inventor | 2010 | Active; MIT | Block-based Android (and limited iOS) app builder | Lets students publish real Play Store apps without typing code; ~15M users globally | https://appinventor.mit.edu/ |
| Greenfoot | 2003 | Active; King’s College London / University of Kent | Java-as-2D-game-IDE for teaching OO | ”Microworld” approach to teaching Java; widely adopted in introductory CS curricula | https://www.greenfoot.org/ |
| BlueJ | 1999 | Active; same team as Greenfoot | Java pedagogy IDE with object-interaction visualizations | Standard tool for university Java courses; visualizes objects and method calls live | https://www.bluej.org/ |
| Alice | 1999 (Alice 2); Alice 3 in 2008 | Active; Carnegie Mellon | 3D-scene programming for storytelling and game-making | Bridges block-based and Java; Alice 3 transitions students to Java syntax | https://www.alice.org/ |
| Hopscotch | 2013 | Active; commercial | iPad-only block-based environment for kids | Touch-first design; popular in 1:1 iPad classrooms | https://www.gethopscotch.com/ |
| Quorum | 2008 | Active; research | Accessibility-focused; designed for visually impaired programmers | Empirically-designed syntax (the “Quorum study” methodology); the first language designed via human-factors experiments | https://quorumlanguage.com/ |
| Kojo | 2010 | Active; small community | Scala for kids — turtle graphics, game-making, math exploration | Brings Scala’s expressiveness to a Logo-style learning environment | https://www.kogics.net/kojo |
| Hedy | 2020 | Active; research (TU Delft) | Gradual programming language: starts Scratch-like, ends Python | Designed to bridge the block-to-text gap; teaches Python in 18 levels | https://www.hedy.org/ |
| Microsoft MakeCode | 2017 | Active; Microsoft | Block + JavaScript for micro:bit, Arcade, LEGO, Minecraft | The dominant environment for BBC micro:bit and educational hardware | https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/makecode |
| Lua (in Roblox Studio context) | 2006 (Roblox Lua) | Active | Used by 20M+ child/teen game-makers via Roblox Studio | Not block-based but functions as a teaching language for an entire generation; massive informal-learning impact | https://create.roblox.com/docs |
Notable threads
The VB6 immortality problem. Microsoft formally ended mainstream support for Visual Basic 6 in 2008, then extended runtime support to Windows 10, then Windows 11, and as of 2026 has effectively committed to the runtime “for the supported lifetime of Windows.” The reason is straightforward: there are tens of thousands of in-house corporate apps written in VB6 between 1998 and 2008 that work, are owned by no one, and would cost millions to rewrite. Modern attempts to migrate (VBUC by Mobilize.Net, .NET Upgrade Assistant) handle the syntax but stumble on COM dependencies and ActiveX controls. The practical advice in 2026 is the same as in 2016: keep the binaries, virtualize Windows if needed, and rewrite only when business need forces it.
Block-based programming has won K-12. Scratch crossed 100 million accounts in 2024, and the broader block-based ecosystem (Snap!, Blockly-derived tools, MakeCode, App Inventor) is the default for ages 8-14 in essentially every country with computing curricula. The pedagogical research consensus has shifted: blocks aren’t training wheels you remove, they’re a different (and effective) representation of programs. The contemporary debate is no longer “blocks vs text” but “when and how to bridge” — Hedy, Snap!‘s Scheme-like rigor, and Pencil Code (block-text bidirectional) are all answers to that question.
Smalltalk’s quiet influence engine. Smalltalk itself never became a mainstream language, but its descendants and its ideas shaped the industry. Self’s prototype-based VM techniques became HotSpot (Java’s JVM) and V8 (Chrome’s JavaScript). The image-based, live-development model influences Lisp machines, Common Lisp’s CLOS, modern hot-reload tooling, and arguably the entire “REPL-driven development” tradition. Test-Driven Development was first articulated in Smalltalk (Kent Beck, SUnit). Refactoring as a discipline started in the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser. Even if you’ve never typed Transcript show:, your tools owe Smalltalk a debt.
The “first language” question keeps cycling. BASIC ruled the 1980s home-computing era. Pascal dominated 1980s-90s university CS. Java held the 2000s. Python is the 2010s-2020s university default. Block-based environments hold K-12. Each transition was driven by the same question — “what’s the lowest-friction way to express computational ideas?” — and each answer was correct for its hardware-and-pedagogy moment. The current frontier is whether LLM-assisted code-completion changes the equation: if Copilot writes the syntax, does syntax matter for first-language choice anymore?
Citations
- Microsoft, “Visual Basic 6 support statement,” learn.microsoft.com (ongoing)
- Microsoft DevBlogs, “Visual Basic support planned for .NET 5.0+” (2020)
- Microsoft, “Deprecated features for Windows client” — VBScript removal, learn.microsoft.com (2024-2025)
- MIT Media Lab, Lifelong Kindergarten Group — Scratch statistics dashboard (2024)
- Squeak Foundation, “History of Squeak” — squeak.org/About
- Bracha, Gilad. “Newspeak Programming Language Specification” (2017)
- Sun Microsystems, “Strongtalk: Mixing strong types with Smalltalk” (originally 1993; open-sourced documentation 2006)
- Instantiations Inc., “VA Smalltalk product overview” (2024)
- Cincom Systems, “VisualWorks customer references” (2024)
- Stefik, A. & Siebert, S. “An Empirical Investigation into Programming Language Syntax” (Quorum study, ACM TOCE 2013)
- Kelleher, C. & Pausch, R. “Lowering the Barriers to Programming” (Alice retrospective, ACM Computing Surveys 2005)
- Resnick, M. et al. “Scratch: Programming for All” (Communications of the ACM 2009)
- Papert, S. “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas” (1980) — foundational text for the entire teaching-languages tradition