Emacs, then elisp perhaps?
30 years later, QBasic is still the best
291–300 of 308 posts
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Saying "FP languages" and only giving examples for Lisp is cheating. Lisp has state, it has an imperative-programming mode, and it has well-developed database libraries; it's not monomaniacally FP (and therefore aggressively unhelpful for games) like Haskell is. (Lisp also has terminology that's much easier to understand than Haskell. What exactly is a monad, again? And why would I care about monads when I already ha…
John Carmack ported Wolfenstein 3D in Haskell. And people have written games in Erlang. [0] [0] http://prog21.dadgum.com/23.html
Oh, I did not know about Carmack's port of Wolfenstein 3D, very neat. Here he is talking about motivations and lessons learned: http://functionaltalks.org/2013/08/26/john-carmack-thoughts-... (Summary: The worst problem he had with the port that he could not motivate himself enough to work on a learning project instead of a current, commercial one.)
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
Racket is a very nice scheme setup. As a SICPer I initially wondered if I should use a scheme variant for my oldest son but I thought back to my youth and decided against it. in HS I wrote a TP program that plotted functions for my math class. It would run through the line entered looking for whitespace operators like * and + and only keywords like sin before (. Then it would write a .BAS file and run it in qbasic to…
Sure. But there's no reason one couldn't start with a BASIC-like language in Racket. Someone would just have to implement it and support it. It's crazy powerful, see eg: "Creating Languages in Racket - Sometimes you just have to make a better mousetrap." http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2068896j
I originally started with BASIC, created a 4GL with it for productivity, discovered LISP, and re-implemented BASIC in it for incremental compilation & macros. So, yes it's doable. :)
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was actually suggest Racket as a great platform for learning programming (it's a "real" language/platform, decent IDE, support for building stand-alone executables, great documentation, sold cross-platform support) - but was a little surprised that I couldn't find a BASIC #lang-uage extension for Racket. It would seem that a BASIC mode and maybe a pure turtle graphics mode should be pretty trivial to make for Racke…
Racket has turtle graphics. [0] Realm of Racket might be a good non-school introduction to programming. [1] I feel like How to Design Programs would be better suited for the classroom, whereas RoR is all about having fun. [0] https://docs.racket-lang.org/turtles/ [1] https://www.nostarch.com/realmofracket
As far as I can gather, that module doesn't support traditional (non-lisp) syntax, along the lines of traditional logo graphics? Which could be why the tutorial section[1] prefers the (apparently more well documented) "#lang slideshow", which gives some of the same benefits (a simple syntax for graphics) with some of the same [ed: drawbacks] (an IMNHO slightly higher bar for entry, due to being Scheme, rather than an even easier language).
[1] https://docs.racket-lang.org/quick/
[ed: Ie: one can't simply cut'n'paste from: http://el.media.mit.edu/logo-foundation/what_is_logo/logo_pr... and get pretty pictures, one has to manually compile (or transpile if you will) from Logo to Scheme first. Which is obviously a job for a computer, not for a brain.]
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#295BASIC-256 is a good alternative to QBasic: http://www.basic256.org/index_en
The voice synthesis with the "say" command is impressive: http://doc.basic256.org/doku.php?id=en:say
Say "Hello, World" (instead of Print...)
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope it gets better.
Appreciate it. Just functional enough to recall pieces of a good, in-depth conversation with you here on programming, software quality, etc. I gave you credit elsewhere for being unusually knowledgeable about present and past techniques of getting job done. Plus noticing high assurance implementation came down to rigorous FSM's and their connection to hardware. Impressive. Since then, although my condition hasn't cha…
Cool! Congratulations! I also think that approach sounds potentially very fertile, and painfully feel the inadequacy of existing methods of programming to the tasks we face today. What kinds of media of expression have you come up with?
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#297I think BASIC! for android by Paul Laughton is a modern good modern alternative for an entry to programming. It comes with good documentation and examples, and is a classic basic-type language.
link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rfo.basic&...
Once a kid might want to move up from that to solve perhaps more practical problems using PCs, I think a combination of bash (including basic usage of rsync, crontab, grep, sed, find, wget, ssh,...) and maybe VBA/Libreoffice Basic can take you a long way. (You can easily make nice little form/button based applications by dragging and dropping in the office suites. Also check out http://excelunusual.com/ for some inspiration on things you can do in VBA which I would not have thought practical!).
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's really a question of the APIs you're using rather than the language. If you're using a browser, you don't even need JS to draw the line; you can just go to this URL: data:text/html, If you're using an API other than the browser, it can be super simple. Like, with processing.js, http://sketchpad.cc/sp/pad/view/zdsBK2b9xo/latest consists of: line(0, 30, 40, 50); and that works. (Although you could surely argue t…
>and that works. Depends on the browser. IE > 8 doesn't support it.
Are you saying processing.js doesn't work in IE after IE 8?
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and that works. Depends on the browser. IE > 8 doesn't support it.
Are you saying processing.js doesn't work in IE after IE 8?
IE 8 and above only supports image data URIs within CSS, link and image tags[0]. Processing.js probably works around that with Canvas or something.
[0]https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/data_URIs
Re: 30 years later, QBasic is still the best
#300Rebol ?
Yes Rebol is a great language to teach kids, especially Rebol/View (http://rebol.com/docs/easy-vid.html).
Below is an example of it draw dialect:
view layout [
box 320x200 effect [
draw [
pen black
line 20x20 80x80
]
]
]