Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)

I love seeing everyone share their stories if learning on a TI-8x.

My school recommended the 83+ but I ended up with an 85, probably because it was on sale or something. This meant I couldn't share games that all the kids had in their 83 so I got my start by copying them by hand and trying to figure out the syntax differences by guessing. After one of those I was able to start making my cheater programs and aced geometry because of it.

I got a TI83 in 4th grade and I realized programming is how you made video games and I decided "ok I'm going to learn to program"

I read the whole manual's programming section but couldn't make heads or tails of it. It assumed you knew basic logic/programming and mostly explained functionality/syntax.

Then in 5th grade my friend who was 3 years older was like "hey look I made a story in my calculator" and it was this big choose your own adventure story. He showed me how to use goto, how to display text, and a function for multiple choice user input + goto. I was in business!

I wrote my own story but had a section where I wanted to do different things if you had gotten an item already so I had to program the whole story twice and only enter the second version from the option where you get the item. I tried writing a more complicated story with more items but the duplication was insane 3 items required 3!=6 copies of common locations. I was like "this is dumb there's got to be a better way" and I looked at the manual again and now I had enough of a framework to understand "OH a variable is whether you have the red key, why didn't they just put that?"

The Basic was SO BAD that I had to learn Z80 assembly to make anything good. Really.

No sane Basic should leak stack memory just because you exited an "If-Then" block without reaching the corresponding "End". Yes that's a thing. If you use "If-Then" and the code never reaches the "End" because you used "Goto" to leave the block, a few bytes are leaked every time that happens, and eventually the program stops with "ERR: Memory". You needed to use "If" then "Goto" on the immediate next line, and that would avoid the leak. Exiting the program or stopping it will give you back all the leaked memory, including seeing that error.

Then you have the lack of actual subroutines or functions. All you can do is call into a separate program, and return things by putting them in specific variables. But the Basic doesn't even have "Gosub".

Also, it's very very slow.

Ah yes, my first love. I remember creating a quiz game based on greek mythology, and a little RPG where I realized the power of exponential functions by wrecking my power curve.