In Vibe Coding: What is it Good For? Absolutely Nothing (Sorry, Linus), The Register makes a comparison between vibe coding today and the BASIC programming of the first generation of home microcomputers:
In one respect, though, vibe coding does have an attractive attribute that is difficult to find elsewhere. For the first time since instant-on home computers that fell straight into a BASIC interpreter, it’s possible to make things happen with a bit of typing as a very naive user.
A big difference between the two scenarios is that on an early micro, you had to use BASIC to get anything else done, in many situations. The computer I used was a Dragon 32 and unless you had a (very expensive) game or package that came on a ROM cartridge, even loading software from cassette required a BASIC command.
Actually it was one of two BASIC commands: you typed CLOAD to load a basic program, or CLOADM to load a machine-language program. Either way, the default behaviour of the computer was to load its BASIC interpreter from ROM and wait for input, that input being in the form of lines of BASIC.
The context of those two commands indicates a big similarity between BASIC and vibe coding: to get particularly far, you needed some knowledge of the workings of the rest of the computer. In this case, you needed to know whether your cassette tape contained a BASIC program or a machine-language program, but that isn’t the most egregious example.
As I said, the computer I used at the time was a Dragon 32, which was a kind of not-clone of the Tandy Color Computer. Let’s say that I wanted to write a game, which is entirely plausible because I both wanted to, and did, write many games. How do I read the joystick direction and fire button status in BASIC, so I can add joystick control to my games?
Direction is relatively easy. There are two potentiometer-based joysticks, right and left, and each has an x and a y axis. The JOYSTK function takes an index which identifies the axis to read, and returns a value from 0 to 63 indicating the extent of travel. For example, JOYSTK(0) is the x axis of the right joystick.
To get the fire button status, I use this operation: the Peripheral Interface Adapter’s side A data register is mapped to location &HFF00 in memory. The right joystick’s fire button unsets bit 0 when it’s pressed, and sets it when it isn’t. The left joystick’s fire button unsets bit 1 when it’s pressed, and sets it when it isn’t. For example, P = PEEK(&HFF00) : F = NOT (P AND 1) sets F to 1if the right fire button is pressed.
Yes, I’m still technically BASIC coding, but I’ve learned a lot about the architecture of the machine and applied advanced mathematical concepts (I was single-digit years old) to improve my BASIC-coded software.
Much more importantly, I’ve become excited to understand this stuff and apply it to the programs I write, and I’m enthusiastic to share those programs and find other people who want to share their programs. There’s an inert plastic box plugged into an old TV in the otherwise-unused middle room of the house, and I can make it do what I want.
The BASIC-haters pooh-poohed that notion: OK you can make your little toys, but real software is written in machine code. Citation needed I’m sure, but I suspect that the advent of Visual BASIC meant that far more real software was being written in BASIC than in machine code even by the 1990s, a decade in which that first generation of micros was redundant but not quite obsolete (the last Commodore 64 was sold in April 1994, because Commodore went bankrupt).
However, the people who learned BASIC just picked up other tools and continued the journey they had been inspired to set out on. I live in the UK and many of the professional programmers I meet, when they’re between about ten years older than me and three years younger than me, are in that BASIC generation. We typed programs on our micros, we learned how the computers worked, and then we transferred that understanding and that exploration to other systems and other programming languages. We watched TRON, and learned to fight for the users: being scared by computers because they refuse to open the pod bay doors was for our parents.
If vibe coding gives this generation that same sense of wonder and empowerment, of being able to control a device that has hitherto only done what other people charge you to do, if it starts that same journey of learning and applying skills, and of sharing that knowledge, then it really doesn’t matter whether you think it’s OK for real software. It really doesn’t matter whether it ends up being a great tool or not.
