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BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

bbcbasic.co.uk

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Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#31

Post by zozbot234 »

blowski wrote: post #26
Mr-Frog wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. Having been a 10-year old when both of these languages were available, my main goals were to make things that looked cool to share with friends and family. My dad set me up with a BASIC256 environment around the time it was released, and I liked it because it gave immediate feedback and had a built-in graphics interface. JavaScript: Cool language, but I was not excited about all of my work happening in a web b…

Mine (starting in late 1980s) was GW-BASIC -> Visual Basic (esp with Access) -> Ruby -> PHP/WordPress -> JavaScript -> everything else. It worked then because it was hard to find education material, and the alternatives (C, Lisp) were so damned hard. I think the trade-off is that Python has an immense ecosystem - libraries (e.g. PyGame Zero), education material, people. Plus you can point to real-world examples of pe…

> I'd be worried that teaching BASIC puts them in a niche - one where they make progress more quickly, but struggle to get out of.

I'd think that learning BASIC then Python (or Ruby, PHP, JS, whatever) would still be a lot easier (at least for a 10 year old kid) than starting with one of the latter languages directly, due to the incidental complexity that all of those have. Most pro developers will be able to work with more than one language anyway.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#32

Post by tragomaskhalos »

blowski wrote: post #3

If you're teaching 10 year old kids to code, is there an advantage to using something like this over Python or JavaScript?

Built-in graphics commands are a massive win, and a big gap in today's standard language offerings for kids. Any old timer will tell you that the ability to trivially get sprites up on the screen, or hell even a coloured circle, is the clue to the young programmer that putting together a simple game is within their immediate grasp, and this is very much the gateway drug to programming in general.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#33

Post by vkaku »

Amazing! My first computer, historically was the BBC Micro and it was so much fun to type and view those programs from the 80s books they released.

One of the things I noticed about the new interpreter's restrictions was that framebuffer pixel accesses have become significantly slow and we're unable to do such things fast because of our dependency on GPU/Host transfers for all new rendering.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#34

Post by zozbot234 »

icosian wrote: post #29
tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

I donated my BBC Model B+ to a computer museum recently, along with a stack of Acorn User magazines (available on the Internet Archive, BTW) and software on cassette. Felt strong pangs of regret driving away. I can still feel the excitement of figuring it all out, a world opening up to me. Those BBC TV shows had the unusual feature of broadcasting software over the end credits. Just had to tape the screeching and pla…

The Internet Archive should have the cassette software as well, although some of it might be hidden from view due to copyright concerns.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#35

Post by zozbot234 »

vkaku wrote: post #33

Amazing! My first computer, historically was the BBC Micro and it was so much fun to type and view those programs from the 80s books they released. One of the things I noticed about the new interpreter's restrictions was that framebuffer pixel accesses have become significantly slow and we're unable to do such things fast because of our dependency on GPU/Host transfers for all new rendering.

GPU programming is more about compositing textures/surfaces, applying various kinds of "3D" projections along the way. In BASIC terms, those "textures" are glorified sprites. You could use shaders to accelerate the kind of 2D pixel-perfect rendering you'd do on a plain old framebuffer, but that's still a matter of research and quite far from the established paradigm.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#36

Post by vkaku »

zozbot234 wrote: post #35
vkaku wrote: post #33

Amazing! My first computer, historically was the BBC Micro and it was so much fun to type and view those programs from the 80s books they released. One of the things I noticed about the new interpreter's restrictions was that framebuffer pixel accesses have become significantly slow and we're unable to do such things fast because of our dependency on GPU/Host transfers for all new rendering.

GPU programming is more about compositing textures/surfaces, applying various kinds of "3D" projections along the way. In BASIC terms, those "textures" are glorified sprites. You could use shaders to accelerate the kind of 2D pixel-perfect rendering you'd do on a plain old framebuffer, but that's still a matter of research and quite far from the established paradigm.

Inserts rant about A[x] taking too long because the programming interface to A does all those fancy things ^

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#38

Post by Retr0id »

vkaku wrote: post #33

Amazing! My first computer, historically was the BBC Micro and it was so much fun to type and view those programs from the 80s books they released. One of the things I noticed about the new interpreter's restrictions was that framebuffer pixel accesses have become significantly slow and we're unable to do such things fast because of our dependency on GPU/Host transfers for all new rendering.

You can still do framebuffer pixel access pretty fast if you want to, the main issue is just that the average framebuffer today has exponentially more pixels.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#39

Post by forinti »

tomalpha wrote: post #4

The killer features of BBC Basic for me were: - instant-on - you turned on the power switch at the back of the BBC Micro, got the double beep, and in less than a second were dropped into a REPL / shell with the language - integrated assembler - you could inline assembly language really easily - great documentation - before the web, documentation meant books - of which there were many - but also crucially in the BBC M…

Having functions and procedures also made it stand out at the time.

Re: BBC Basic returns on multiple platforms, open sourced

#40

Post by vkaku »

Retr0id wrote: post #38
vkaku wrote: post #33

Amazing! My first computer, historically was the BBC Micro and it was so much fun to type and view those programs from the 80s books they released. One of the things I noticed about the new interpreter's restrictions was that framebuffer pixel accesses have become significantly slow and we're unable to do such things fast because of our dependency on GPU/Host transfers for all new rendering.

You can still do framebuffer pixel access pretty fast if you want to, the main issue is just that the average framebuffer today has exponentially more pixels.

If that app ran in a 640x480 mode, memory accesses would be just as fast as the VGA applications 25 years ago, correct?

I do think there's a lot more going on than that. Here's SDL's current pixel access code:

https://github.com/libsdl-org/SDL/blob/main/src/video/SDL_su...

To do a pixel read there's at least a lock, memcpy, format conversion and an unlock.

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