51–60 of 66 posts
Learned BASIC in 1973, first computer class at my high school. Pascal, FORTRAN, and COBOL in college. Started working at IBM in 1978. "High level languages are for wimps". Assembly all the way baby!
Ah those were the days.
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 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.
My kids are growing up on the same old 8-bit machines that I grew up on. After all: those old 8-bit machines still work just fine for the task of learning to write code.
Any reason not to still use old 8-bit machines to learn programming? I can't think of a single one.
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…
- read in the text file of the new process, which was a specially programmed QBasic program that included predefined hooks to facilitate preemptive multitasking and that was capable of saving and loading its state (i.e. values of all variables).
- merge this text file with the text files of all other running processes, including the "kernel", and saving the new "system image" to disk.
- call the "save state" of all running processes
- exit from QBasic by running a batch file that would restart QBasic with the new system image, which would initiate by calling the "load state" of all processes.
It kind of worked :-) Such a pity I lost that code...
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.
http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/268/26877.html
I had no trouble understanding pointers when I had a go at learning C++ later (although I'm sure the experience has left a number of other bad coding habits).
My first approach to programming was Sinclair BASIC of a ZX Spectrum +3 . I learn soem stuff with a books of "BASIC for childrens", and the ZX spectrum +3 manual. I remember doing a program to study multiplication tables, printing it, and then asking me for the values... Good old times.
Funny how people perceive programming as way more advanced than multiplication, but you could write this program before you memorized the multiplication tables. I think the sequence of topics in math education is really wrong. Another example: in the USA, "discrete math" is a college class at the same level as calculus (or higher!), even though it mostly builds off elementary algebra.
To this day, my preferred way of understanding maths is by looking at implementations of the algorithms - I find mathematical notation and every maths textbook I've seen to be extremely tedious and overcomplicated compared to code (of course with the caveat that at least some of this is because I've spent far more time learning to understand programming, though I still found that route easier when I was in school)
I miss Antic and the other magazines that came with programs to type in and modify. I learned about checksumming from those magazines :)
Here you go: https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aantic-maga...
http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/
And this one: http://www.atarimania.com/list-atari-magazines.html
(though they say Commodore and Atari respectively, both of them have some magazines that are more generic)
BASIC has been rather remarkable for it adaptability. Microsoft's Visual Basic, for instance, has managed to become a rather modern object-oriented typed language. As much flack as it gets from "real" programmers, probably more code is still written in VB than most other languages combined (although that is certainly starting to change now with the rise of open source scripting languages as well as the rise of Javasc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here you go: https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3Aantic-maga...
There's another fantastic collection of old computer magazines here: http://www.bombjack.org/commodore/ And this one: http://www.atarimania.com/list-atari-magazines.html (though they say Commodore and Atari respectively, both of them have some magazines that are more generic)
I looked up Ray West recently, wondering if he's still alive. Turned out he was until recently, but he'd turned into a mad, racist, tinfoil-hat-wearing crackpot, paranoid about Jewish conspiracies and government hoaxes. Fluoride, fake moon landings, the whole nine yards. So sad. That guy was my hero, and he just went off the rails and, as far as I could ever find, completely disappeared.
ETA: nope, he's still around, and still antisemitic. Ah well.
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 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.