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BASIC at 50

dartmouth.edu

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Re: BASIC at 50

#41

Post by zem »

vivin wrote: post #16
astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

> "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C" So much of this! I remember the older kids talking about Pascal (they were using TurboPascal at the time) and to me it was some mystical, highly-advanced form of magic, a sort of "more complex" BASIC. However, I never actually learned Pascal or used it, because I jumped directly from BASIC to C (actually ended up doing both for a while). The reason I even found out about C,…

i taught myself c by prototyping programs in qbasic and then translating them as straightforwardly as possible. qbasic also had an absolutely brilliant integrated help system; that's one of the things i've always admired microsoft for.

Re: BASIC at 50

#42

Post by pvg »

anigbrowl wrote: post #24
wiremine wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what today's generation growing up on? Take here to ask the same question. What hooked me on BASIC was the graphic capabilities. It was relatively easy to create dumb little graphic programs: circles that changed colors and grew, etc.

Unless you ended up using a Commodore 64 or one of its ancestors which was completely sprite-oriented and thus not much good for canvas-type programming. I've often thought my life might have been different if I had asked my parents to get me a Sinclair spectrum instead of relying on the fact that our school had Commodore computers to push them towards a Vic-20.

Sprites? Luxury! We went to bed hungry dreaming of a linear framebuffer while seven angry pixels fought viciously over a single colour bit, keeping us awake. On an Apple ][, that is.

Re: BASIC at 50

#43

Post by analog31 »

gamegoblin wrote: post #26
astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

I am 21, and when I was 12 I started coding with TI-BASIC, which is a (terrible, terrible) flavor of BASIC that comes on most TI graphing calculators. Most kids still have these calculators, so I imagine there are several learning on it.

Do you think a graphing calculator is worth bothering with at all? I'm too old to have used one in school. The cynical side of me thinks that they only exist because they have a captive audience of school kids who are required to buy them.

Re: BASIC at 50

#44

Post by sirsar »

analog31 wrote: post #43
gamegoblin wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am 21, and when I was 12 I started coding with TI-BASIC, which is a (terrible, terrible) flavor of BASIC that comes on most TI graphing calculators. Most kids still have these calculators, so I imagine there are several learning on it.

Do you think a graphing calculator is worth bothering with at all? I'm too old to have used one in school. The cynical side of me thinks that they only exist because they have a captive audience of school kids who are required to buy them.

I have found that the TI-83 series handles numbers remarkably better than many programming languages and even software packages. The built-in functions are diverse, composable, and very powerful, yet simultaneously simple to use. When I want to answer e.g., a statistics question, it's a huge time saver to plug it into the graphing calculator rather than anything else. I often prefer it even to WolframAlpha. In that respect it's well worth the $100 or so it cost.

Re: BASIC at 50

#45

Post by voltagex_ »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #11
astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

>> "I think there's a whole generation that grew up on BASIC. I wonder what today's generation growing up on?" About 6 years ago when I was in high school we were using...Pascal! During that time I actually did some work experience with Borland (creators of Turbo Pascal) and they found it hilarious we were still using it.

VB6 and Pascal chiming in here, too. I think I dropped that course after a while - I was doing it via distance education because my school didn't offer any programming classes. This was some time around 2008-9.

Re: BASIC at 50

#48

Post by cmang »

protomyth wrote: post #29
watmough wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, similar experience here, but when every web browser (to some approximation) includes Javascript, you can hardly say that programming is inaccessible. In most every possible way (except possibly writing files), Javascript simply wipes the floor with Basic.

Except the cost, no replacements for those cheap 8-bits such as the ZX-81, Vic 20, or Atari 400. Computer programming is less accessible than in the late 70's and early 80's.

Android tablets? They are cheaper than the 8-bit micros of the 70s and 80s, outselling everything, and come with Javascript. The only problem is they don't usually come with much of a proper keyboard + text editor for editing code. So, a kid still has to take some initiative to get a bit of software before being able to actually code something. (Kind of lame, I hope that changes - it was nice being a kid when computers were programmable out of the box without requiring anything extra. Then again, we didn't have the internet back then, so getting new stuff into the computer wasn't as simple.)

Re: BASIC at 50

#49

Post by DerekL »

cmang wrote: post #48
protomyth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except the cost, no replacements for those cheap 8-bits such as the ZX-81, Vic 20, or Atari 400. Computer programming is less accessible than in the late 70's and early 80's.

Android tablets? They are cheaper than the 8-bit micros of the 70s and 80s, outselling everything, and come with Javascript. The only problem is they don't usually come with much of a proper keyboard + text editor for editing code. So, a kid still has to take some initiative to get a bit of software before being able to actually code something. (Kind of lame, I hope that changes - it was nice being a kid when compute…

You know what's also cheaper than an 8-bit in the 80s? Full computers today. The cheapest Windows machines, desktop or laptop, are about $300–400, from Dell, for example. In 1984, a Commodore 64 was about $200, or $450 if you include one disk drive. But with inflation, that's $451 and $1016 respectively in today's dollars.

But you could get a ZX81 for only $25, which is $56 in today's dollars. But that's about the price of a Raspberry Pi.

Re: BASIC at 50

#50

Post by EvanAnderson »

I think John Kemeny, co-inventor of BASIC, was a pretty interesting guy. He worked with computers under Feynman during the Manhattan Project. He argued for widespread computer literacy in the mid-1960's. He's worth reading about, for sure.

I happened into a copy of Kemeny's book "Man and the Computer" (http://www.amazon.com/Man-Computer-John-Kemeny/dp/0684130432) sometime around 90-91, and it fascinated me. I've gone back and read it since and, while many of Kemeney's predictions didn't hold up, the tone of the book is definitely inspiring.

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