KidBASIC
- The project begins as KidBASIC, created by Ian Paul Larsen — a small, friendly BASIC aimed at teaching children and beginners to program without the jargon of "grown-up" languages.
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About
The story of BASIC-256
A simple, graphical BASIC built to teach anyone to program — from a schoolroom tool called KidBASIC in 2006 to the modern, open-source, run-anywhere language it is today.
What BASIC-256 is
BASIC-256 is an easy-to-use version of the BASIC programming language designed to teach the fundamentals of computing to beginners — especially young people. Its clear syntax and built-in graphics, sound and text give new programmers immediate visual feedback: type a few lines, run them, and watch something happen on screen. That instant loop between writing code and seeing results is what has kept it in classrooms and on home computers for nearly two decades.
A short history
- KidBASIC is renamed BASIC-256 (also written Basic-256 / BASIC256) as the language grows beyond its original scope while keeping the same beginner-first spirit.
- James M. Reneau, Ph.D. becomes the project's lead developer and maintainer, hosting it on SourceForge and greatly expanding the language — custom graphics, sound and music, sprites, arrays, files, databases and networking.
- Built in C++ with the Qt framework, BASIC-256 becomes genuinely cross-platform, running on Windows, Linux and macOS.
- Reneau writes a free companion textbook, So You Want to Learn to Program?, so anyone can learn the language from the ground up — see the book page.
- The classic SourceForge line reaches its last release there, 2.0.0.11, and later slows down — leaving a mature, much-loved language in need of modernizing.
v2.1 — the continuation
- The project is picked up and continued on GitHub, taking the
2.0.99.10.2branch as its starting point. - Modernized to Qt6 + CMake with GitHub Actions CI and an automated test suite, plus builds for Windows, Linux, Raspberry Pi and macOS (Apple Silicon).
- A new WebAssembly build brings the full editor and interpreter to the browser — no install needed — and a new documentation site replaces the old online help.
- Read the details on the release notes page.
Dates and attributions are drawn from the project's public history; the modern v2.1 work is documented in the repository's README and ChangeLog.
Want to learn the language?
Reneau's free textbook teaches BASIC-256 from the ground up, chapter by chapter.