31–40 of 73 posts
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial…
I've been dismissive of BASIC as an outdated and terrible language since reading some old programs written in it. But reading the docs and examples for FreeBasic actually make it look decent. Static typing, decent syntax, and I don't even have to start all my lines with 10 20 30 so I can JUMP to them!
I think the fact that the old 8-bit computers booted straight into BASIC and came with amazing manuals (at least Amstrad) that taught you programming was amazing and what made me a software engineer in the end. I shared some of this amazement and examples in: https://retrofun.pl/2021/05/18/hobbyarding/ But with BASIC getting so much hatred since the 70s... I started with the famous Dijkstra quote and did an investiga…
“Bad” depends on purpose. For teaching novices a bit is programming, I think old-school BASIC with line numbers and goto is hard to beat.
I also did an experiment not to praise BASIC without criticism and tried Advent of Code in BBC BASIC... it makes you focus on the "how" a lot, almost like assembly, while modern higher level languages let you focus on the "what" instead. On the other hand that still makes it good for learning how things really work. Not having a string.split for example makes you iterate over the string instead, and you'll be aware how split works whether you wanted it or not.
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial…
Paul Allen has long been dead WTH you are talking about?
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial…
Paul Allen has long been dead WTH you are talking about?
To me, the most critical thing in the hobby market right now is the lack of good software courses, books and software itself. Without good software and an owner who understands programming, a hobby computer is wasted. Will quality software be written for the hobby market? Almost a year ago, Paul Allen and myself, expecting the hobby market to expand, hired Monte Davidoff and developed Altair BASIC. Though the initial…
Paul Allen has long been dead WTH you are talking about?
I've been dismissive of BASIC as an outdated and terrible language since reading some old programs written in it. But reading the docs and examples for FreeBasic actually make it look decent. Static typing, decent syntax, and I don't even have to start all my lines with 10 20 30 so I can JUMP to them!
Serious question: What makes BASIC BASIC? I don't see anything in the FreeBasic example code that looks anything like what GWBASIC was 40 years ago. No line numbers and not a single GOTO. Is there still support for compiling old style BASIC or did the BASIC name move on to mean something completely different from what it used to?
I started programming when I was around 12. My teacher told me about how he learned BASIC in school...so I went home and looked up BASIC. I had a lot of fun messing around with qbasic/qb64 and finally FreeBASIC. Semi-related but one of my favorite books of all time was Creating Adventure Games On Your Computer by Tim Hartnell. It's wild to think how much of an impact that book and FreeBASIC had on me. If I could upvo…
Thanks very much for this book reference. Our son (10yo) is learning to code and after quite a bit of research (and to my own huge surprise), I've pointed him to QBASIC (via DosBOX). I'm just a hobbyist, and approaching 40, so maybe this is pure nostalgia. But I do think text adventures (especially writing one yourself) are still a great way to teach coding -- and the whole keyboard-centric paradigm of computing. As…
I looked up BASIC for mac, and lo and behold, there seems to be only one, by Nikolay Denislamov that is useful, and it's limit-ware (program size) and $12 to go "premium". Not even GAMBAS. I found Basic! and techBASIC on the ipad, and they might run on Apple Silicon. The latter is not in the appstore these days.(It seems to have morphed into something else) (quick download) Basic! runs on Ventura/MacMiniM2. How well…
There's a few Mac based BASICs but I'm not sure how they fare now with the new CPUs. Come share your findings with us in the discord BASIC community if you use discord: https://discord.gg/rWaFeCca3P