Although I started my adventures in programming in Assembler (65c02, 68000) it was probably the discover of BASIC (I still remember it stands for "Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code"!) that showed my that computers could be fun (nerd alert!)

I used various forms of BASIC on a wide range of machines - Atom, BBC B, MSX, Oric, RML, ZX81 etc - before PCs became a more regular feature in my life and QuickBASIC was often a quick and easy way to get things done in the days of DOS. With the rise of Windows Visual Basic became the de facto way that many developers were first introduced to programming.

Time passed and the development environment got more complex and VB "grew up", gained some object oriented type features and became a member of the .Net family of languages. It was no longer an easy starting point for new developers - and languages like C# and Java became more prominent.

Well, that simple, easy to get started concept is back. And in keeping with the aim the name says it all - Small Basic. It's not trying to be big and clever, but as a good way for kids to get started and see results quickly.

In it's default form there are only 15 keywords - but even so it's petty capable. The development environment features all the things you'd expect from a modern platform such as Intellisense and context sensitive help. The neat this though is that it's an extensible environment so other developers can add features and capabilities to the base product to help it grow.

Check it out at the MSDN DevLabs (the same folks who bring you PopFly), read more at their blog and don't forget to check out their "Hello World"!

I wonder how long it'll take me to re-write "snake" ;)

When I first heard about Popfly I didn't really grok it but now I've had a week or so to play with it and try to make sense of it... it's really cool.

Everyone talks about mashups and how they're changing the rules on the interweb... but too often it still means a lot of laborious programming and testing and delving through API documentation.

Yahoo! Pipes was supposed to make it all better, and if fact from a programmers perspective it's certainly made things easier.

Where Popfly really shines though (and I totally agree with Chris Pirillo on this) is that it makes mashups a totally graphical, drag'n'drop no-code experience that even I can get my head around....

15 mins after signing in I had my first mashup running (Virtual Earth showing the 5 latest Twitter posts updated every 30 seconds)

Once you've built a Popfly mashup you're not limited to running it on the Popfly site. You can embed it on your own site, or on Spaces or even download it as a Vista gadget.

Even at this very early alpha stage the capabilities of the basic no-code tool are pretty fantastic. Add to that the very simple coding language they've implemented and anyone who can code in JavaScript, PHP or VB/C# is going to have no problems extending this.

I can only imagine the power that's going to roll into here as the team add more blocks (wrappers for APIs or output/display mechanisms) and fine-tune the UI.

As an example of what Silverlight can do (itself still a product in development) it's even more impressive - a Microsoft team really eating our own dogfood (and finding that it tastes just fine!)

Right now I don't know much about it but it looks like it might be interesting.

Popfly is a set of online visual tools for building Web pages and mashups (Creator) combined with an online community where you can host, share, rate, comment and even remix creations from other Popfly users (Spaces).

More information will be released at Popfly.ms as the project moves forward, meanwhile check out John Montgomery's blog for a more personal insight.

Update: a bit more information on TechCrunch, and I just got a mail with some more info internally (but no, I'm not telling unless you ping me from a Microsoft email address!)