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BASIC was not just a programming language

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Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#111

Post by ramijames »

cxr wrote: post #100
ramijames wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, but at the same time I know that if I re-run it in two years it will suffer from bitrot and ill have to futz around with it to get to run. I hate that a lot.

Surely by "re-run" you mean "try to re-build". If you write something that runs in the browser today (and you're not doing something dumb like using experimental or otherwise non-standard APIs), chances are extremely high that it will still work in two years. The browser is one of the most consistent, interoperable, stable software platforms that the industry has managed to produce.

Yes, that's what I mean, thanks.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#112

Post by michaelcampbell »

indymike wrote: post #75
teamonkey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.“ I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC. If you created something in basic, or even suggested using…

"Teamonkey's law" sounds good to me. Whenever BASIC is mentioned, someone will invoke Dijkstra's rant. >If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript. I'm not sure about that. The only language that I felt led to bad things from developers was perl, mainly because it was so difficult to read later.

> mainly because it was so difficult to read later

But it wasn't, it was just so easy to write badly early.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#113

Post by foul »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #62
teamonkey wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.“ I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC. If you created something in basic, or even suggested using…

> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript. Why JS and not PHP?

PHP stops you from being clever with it by making you angry at times. It's very predictable too, on its hardly avoidable, disgusting pitfalls.

But things may still change for the worse with that process of Scala-ification they are doing to PHP 8.x.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#114

Post by jdougan »

zozbot234 wrote: post #50
flohofwoe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the biggest motivation to not dip my toes too much into BASIC on 8-bit computers was the abysmal performance. If I remember right, assembler was about 100x faster, compiled high-level languages like PASCAL about 10x faster, and FORTH somewhere inbetween compiled languages and assembler.

FORTH could've been a very elegant alternative to BASIC on 8-bit class hardware, but one major problem with it was that having to enter absolutely everything as RPN/postfix notation could be very unintuitive at times. E.g. prefix or mixfix notation for some things such as math is only very slightly harder to parse, but then provides a big gain in user friendliness. And floating point math takes up a big chunk of the…

Look up the Jupiter Ace from 1982. A lot like a Timex-Sinclair, but with Forth as the built in language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#115

Post by zubairq »

bigbillheck wrote: post #88
zubairq wrote: post #4

I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that sam…

> accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64 It's not the same, it's better.

Author of parent comment here: As a funny side note, my current project for ten years has been JavaScript based :)

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#116

Post by DebtDeflation »

ikari_pl wrote: post #91
DebtDeflation wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC As someone whose first exposure to computer programming was BASIC on an Apple II in the early 1980s when I was around 8-9 years old and who later went on to learn multiple other programming languages, I always wondered what about BASIC inspired that particular sentiment. Was it the line numbers? The GOTO statement? The use of "G…

I tried to answer it in the article that someone recently posted to HN as well - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38743062 spoilers: There was no GOSUB in the version Dijkstra commented on. There was not even anything else to put in an "THEN" statement than a line number ("THEN 210" is the code). If you wanted to store user's name in your variable, "n" was the name to go with, because "name" was not supported. An…

Interesting, I wasn't aware how much the language had evolved from the mid 1970s through the early 1980s.

However, this line in your article would seem to indicate that GOSUB was available in the original version:

>The first version of the language was extremely limited, compared to any later popular version of BASIC. The only supported keywords apart from math functions were: LET, PRINT, END, FOR...NEXT, GOTO, GOSUB...RETURN, IF...THEN, DEF, READ, DATA, DIM, and REM.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#117

Post by rahimnathwani »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #105
ikari_pl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is even more interesting, 32767 is the max signed 16-bit int. And it wouldn't wrap to 0 after that for sure. Btw does it allow 0? Amstrad's BASIC does not (oficially).

I no longer have an Acorn Electron, but using ElkJS ( https://elkjs.azurewebsites.net/ ) I did: >0 REM >10 REM >RENUMBER 32767,1 >LIST 32767 REM 0 REM >0 REM >LIST 0 REM 32767 REM 0 REM

I asked a friend to test this on a real Acorn Electron. It behaved the same.

He also found some more info from the web and by trying stuff out:

  Hey, I confirmed this is the same on the actual machine so yep it looks like this was part of the ROM. I found a small amount of info, including that the maximum actual line number is 65279 (BBC BASIC V file format — Matt Godbolt’s blog (xania.org). It looks like the BASIC editor only properly dealt with lines up to 32767 (0x7FFF), including ANDing them with that when using LIST!
Weird things happen if you have a program with line numbers beyond 32767. LIST shows the wrong line numbers, RENUMBER doesn't renumber GOTOs properly.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#118

Post by musicale »

teamonkey wrote: post #39
zubairq wrote: post #4

I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that sam…

“It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.“ I genuinely feel that Dijkstra’s famous rant about BASIC had a big hand in killing it off. I don’t think it was the intention but it created so much bias against BASIC. If you created something in basic, or even suggested using…

> If there’s one language guilty of causing brain damage it’s surely JavaScript

Hahaha. I largely consider JavaScript to be the new BASIC - not because you can learn how to do some fun or useful things with it in an afternoon, but because it is ubiquitous. Web browsers are everywhere, and nearly all of them have JavaScript. A lot of JavaScript's quirkiness and inconvenience seems to derive from its web browser/DOM environment. (It's probably still easier to write GUI apps in Visual BASIC.)

Also: I'm still disappointed that Python 3 removed the print statement, so that

    print "hello, world!"
is no longer a program that works both in BASIC and in Python.

Re: BASIC was not just a programming language

#119

Post by musicale »

zubairq wrote: post #4

I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that sam…

> accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64

JavaScript is ubiquitous (which is why I consider it to be BASIC's de facto heir), but it's (much) less accessible than BASIC was.

And as good BBSes, user groups, and print magazines may have been for sharing C64 programs, the internet is pretty great for sharing JavaScript programs with people all over the world.

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