Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC

There's an entire sub-culture of collaborative development - github, etc - which would have been impossible with 8-bit micro technology.

Away from that, a lot of non-devs have hacked together simple VBA/AppleScripts. And not a few people with zero experience have produced apps of reasonable quality.

Never mind web pages, including Wordpress sites.

Of course you can't own your hardware any more. But no one ever did. Even if you built a Z80 micro from scratch and burned your own EPROMs for it, you were still stuck with the original instruction set, and you likely had no idea how it worked on the inside. You certainly couldn't hack it to change it.

As someone who made a brief living building custom Z80 controllers and coding in assembler, I'm thrilled by modern dev tools, and the fact that if you have a problem you can almost always find the answer online.

Compare that to my first C programming experience on the Atari ST, where I spent two weeks trying to work out why a library function in the compiler didn't work, only to get a letter - on paper - from the compiler developers saying 'Er, we haven't done that part yet.'

But I can imagine them ruining it. It would be tied to their cloud service (oh my tablet's offline? Half of the features won't work, the manual is gone and I can't share my code). It would be updated all the time so wouldn't be stable. The runtime and IDE would be so fragmented (one of the benefits of ROM was that it was expensive to burn so tended to be quite stable over a long period). And of course there would be the AOSP version and the Google version furthering fragmentation.

Modern computing has turned me into a cynic. I'm slowly starting to hate what our industry has become. By the time I was old enough to start my professional career, the world I had fallen in love with was gone.

Yes, it's easier to create the good stuff (well, at least web stuff and mobile apps…), but I'd doubt that it's as easy to create silly crap that you're inordinately proud of. That may be nothing more than a simple question/answer loop, but even with that you created something and you understand some basics of how a program operates…

"Why Johnny can't read" was about literacy, not everyone going out to be a journalist or Hemingway. I view Brin's piece in the same light.

But yeah, we really shouldn't get lost too much in nostalgia. Things aren't that bad and projects like the Raspberry Pi show that this subject is tackled today. For me, the lesson to learn from BASIC environments aren't about forcing people to relive that nowadays, but that the programs that resulted out of the very first days with such a computer are interesting for educational purposes.

On the plus side, it was every bit as approachable as this post makes it sound. Not just because of its "always-on" nature, but because of the relatively small learning surface it presented: line numbers, GOTO, a few operators. It was comprehensible in a way that more complex languages weren't.

On the minus side, soaking my young mind in the paradigm of structuring program flow around line numbers bent it in ways that didn't become apparent until I got a little older and tried to graduate to languages like Pascal and C. I struggled to get comfortable in these environments in ways that other peers with less programming experience did not, precisely because I had internalized so much of BASIC's skewed way of thinking about program structure. It took a fair bit of time to un-learn the bad habits all that BASIC programming had taught me.

Thus for me the biggest step in moving to C when I was 12 or so was string processing and the concept of having to compile it and the weird include files. And why do I have to write -lm to djgpp so I can use cos? Those were the days.