Often, Minecraftians (Minecrafters? Minecraftalities?) build wonderful things. On other occasions, they build things that are of almost no use whatsoever. This working BASIC programming code interpreter likely falls into the latter block pile yet the dedication, time and effort that has gone into making it exist is quite remarkable.
Some of our best Minecraft maps are quite remarkable too – you should check ‘em out.
I imagine a sizeable number of Minecraft-a-trons will be too young to remember BASIC or the games powered by the now glaringly dated programming language that was founded in the mid-1960s but endured its glory years two decades later; however creator SethBling does a fine job of explaining how it works and, most interestingly, how he managed to shoehorn it into Minecraft. Over to him:
As is shown at the beginning of the video, SethBling’s BASIC interpreter is made in vanilla Minecraft’s standard ruleset and uses a lot of command blocks which he “pretty much wrote by hand” – an impressive feat in and of itself.
In the past, other clever Minecraft-sters have managed to emulate block-built computers using the OpenComputer mod, or the Lua programming language. While this one probably isn’t something I’ll personally be using in a hurry – I once owned a Commodore 64: I’ve had enough BASIC for one lifetime – simply knowing this sort of thing is possible, and that folk are willing to dedicate so much time towards making it happen, makes me feel a bit warm and fuzzy inside.