It was really cool! The ease of getting started was definitely one of the selling points for the “home computers” of that era (GW-BASIC ran on IBM compatible PCs instead, but the appeal of BASIC was the same). Brevity was an important feature since a lot of people obtained programs by typing them over from a magazine or recording them from the radio. And of course, there was no such thing as auto-complete (let alone AI generation).

That being said, SDL isn't actually that bad either. A minimal example is about 40 lines of code [1], not counting comments and blank lines, but including lines with just a curly brace which you could easily remove if you were concerned about size. A slightly more serious implementation of Snake runs about 345 lines of code [2].

And to be fair, DONKEY.BAS is also cheating slightly on the line metric by stuffing lines full of statements, like for example:

    A$=INKEY$:IF A$=CHR$(27) THEN 1298 ELSE POKE 106,0:IF LEN(A$)>0 THEN LINE (CX,CY)-(CX+28,CY+44),0,BF:CX=252-CX:PUT (CX,CY),CAR%,PRESET:SOUND 200,1

>I'm not sure if you could even get an SDL window open and game loop running in 131 lines of (non-golfed) C.

The basics (window, events, renderer) can be done in about 30 lines:

    #include <SDL3/SDL.h>
    #include <SDL3/SDL_main.h>

    static SDL_Window* window;
    static SDL_Renderer* renderer;

    int main(int argc, char* argv) {
        SDL_Init(SDL_INIT_VIDEO|SDL_INIT_AUDIO|SDL_INIT_GAMEPAD);
        SDL_CreateWindowAndRenderer("test", 640, 480, SDL_WINDOW_RESIZABLE, &window, &renderer);
        SDL_Event event;
    
        while(true) {
            while(SDL_PollEvent(&event) != 0) {
                if (event.type == SDL_EVENT_QUIT) {
                    goto ENDGAME;
                }
                //events go here
            }
            
            // update here
            SDL_SetRenderDrawColor(renderer,0,0,0,255);
            SDL_RenderClear(renderer);

            // render here
            SDL_RenderPresent(renderer);

        }

        ENDGAME:
        SDL_DestroyRenderer(renderer);
        SDL_DestroyWindow(window);
        SDL_Quit();
    }

Back in the days you would buy printed magazines that contained full basic source code of programs and games and type them on your own text editor. I was a bit too young to do that but I remember watching my older brother just do that and then play games (after finding the typing errors for a while).

What we lost is simplicity across the stack.

I learned to program with BASIC. It was awful. I didn’t know how awful it was until many years later. So I don’t miss the language. But something I miss is how easy it was to learn what your machine was doing.

The DOS boot and config involved only two files: CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT, that was it. Most programs were self-contained, so you could copy the directory to a floppy disk and run them on another machine. If you broke something, copy the files again and restart; that was it… I “broke” config and programs many times, and it was a good way to learn.

Python is the modern Basic replacement, and also has similar fundamental design trade-offs. VB6 was the peak of the OLE/Multimedia paradigm, and was functionally replaced by the web browser script sandbox.

> we've lost something over the years.

Indeed, Information Appliances were never general-purpose computers. Some people used to care about that sort of thing, and left civilization the GNU compilers as one of the most important intellectual artifacts of our generation. =3

131 lines and about 10% of them are the title/copyright banner. Genuinely impressive in it's terseness

raylib might do it in less lines. SDL is designed as a cross platform base layer to wrap in another framework not as something you should be using directly.

BASIC was higher level (or anyway, more batteries-included) than C. You could probably do this game in 131 lines of javascript straightforwardly.