Hm. I thought it was going to be about this book:
https://www.retro-kit.co.uk/page.cfm/content/Advanced-Progra...
Hands down the best book from that era, it taught so many useful concepts in a very accessible way.
Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
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Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#42> bear in mind these are very primitive games from the 1970s. They aren't going to win any awards for gameplay, or programming sophistication This is where I feel sad for today's kids. The pressure to make a great game was lower back then. Programming felt like an amazing accomplishment very quickly. Now, kids feel like they've accomplished very little, even though they're doing more with less code than we did during…
> Now, kids feel like they've accomplished very little, even though they're doing more with less code than we did during our generation.
I haven’t observed that. My nephew has great fun building things in Scratch and is really happy with what he has made even though it’s not some triple A game. I had the exact same experience writing stuff in Basic and knowing it could never be like the Buck Rogers arcade machine I’d played.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#43As someone who spent a decent chunk of his youth typing BASIC commands from Books like these into a Mattel Aquarius, I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages. None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the…
Why not QuickBASIC or (for modern systems) FreeBASIC[0]? It can be used both like old-school BASIC with line numbers and such, or as a modern style with named functions and subroutines, and FreeBASIC is FOSS.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#44Personally, Compute! magazine was my goto for games... The fact it autocheck the checksum at the end of each line was a sanity saver! Anyone else remember the hex code dumps they had for entering/checking machine language programs? I still remember going thru 84 screens of the stuff to get an awesome monitor program with assembly/disassembly functionality!
Personally I preferred the basic listings to the machine language ones, with the asm listings somewhere in the middle. With the basic listings you could understand what you were typing in as you did it. With ml you’re just a monkey typing in numbers. Sure you could disassemble it at that point (if you had a disassembler), but the barrier to reaching that understanding was so much higher than with basic listings.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#45As someone who spent a decent chunk of his youth typing BASIC commands from Books like these into a Mattel Aquarius, I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages. None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the…
At least VB.NET is part of the list. I guess the only modern environments where we could replicate the experience would be something like running MicroPython on an Raspberry Pi 400. Or the Swift Playgrounds (assuming an external keyboard).
Raspberry Pi 400 can run the full Python3 language, so why MicroPython ? IMHO, MicroPython is more suitable for something like an ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#46Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#47Any MacOS users who might need a little help running the originals: I downloaded the GitHub sources for the book and then downloaded the MacOS version of Vintage BASIC.
To run Super Star Trek, this command line worked for me in Terminal:
~/Downloads/vintage-basic-1.0.3/bin/vintbas ~/Downloads/basic-computer-games-main/84_Super_Star_Trek/superstartrek.bas
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
At least VB.NET is part of the list. I guess the only modern environments where we could replicate the experience would be something like running MicroPython on an Raspberry Pi 400. Or the Swift Playgrounds (assuming an external keyboard).
Raspberry Pi 400 can run the full Python3 language, so why MicroPython ? IMHO, MicroPython is more suitable for something like an ESP32 or Raspberry Pi Pico.
I was thinking of running it bare metal, ESP32 and Raspberry Pi Pico aren't a keyboard computer like the 8 bit ones from the 1980's.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself, that waste of life is a small death, and the blood is on our industry. The majority of people have no interest in programming, no matter how humane a language were handed to them.
That is absolutely a myth; what we tell ourselves so we can sleep at night. At worst, they don’t know what they want; they asked for a faster horse, and we’re content to keep selling horses and feed. Watch a normal user use a computer sometime to do work without interjecting. They all do stupid repetitive tasks that take hours and should be easily automated. Look how far people get with Excel with no programming know…
> Watch a normal user use a computer sometime to do work without interjecting. They all do stupid repetitive tasks that take hours and should be easily automated.
if you buy the hypothesis about autism in Baron Cohen's book, it is the noticing of and obsession with repetition that is the hallmark of autism, so it is your watches-and-does-not-interject individual who is the one who wants to program, and still not the subject of the study.
Re: Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
#50As someone who spent a decent chunk of his youth typing BASIC commands from Books like these into a Mattel Aquarius, I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages. None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for normal humans to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the…
> People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not
I make no claims, but I think you might find this interesting...
https://asciinema.org/a/SM9tZ2ZiJofikPRxHCQyqDvRY
Just published this in Hackage (Haskell), it is a very early version,so probably contain a lot of rough edges..