He started undergrad in 2009.. how old was he when writing this? 12-13??
Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
81–90 of 93 posts
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#82He started undergrad in 2009.. how old was he when writing this? 12-13??
From an earlier post, I had the realization that many of us started programming at this age on calculators.
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#83Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#84Do you think Boris can still be reached under pickledcherry668@yahoo.com ?
Completely off-topic, but I recall hearing that Boris spent some time in Japan before Anthropic, learning to make miso paste the traditional way while living there. Interesting to see that he's been interested in lacto-fermentation for decades now.
Only bc we’re on a nerd site, miso doesn’t involve lacto fermentation in any significant way. And I guess you can pickle cherries in any number of ways that aren’t lacto fermentation.
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#85It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.
That’s me with a TI-85 in 7th grade in ‘95 or so. It was effectively a portable computer that I was allowed to use and play with in most classes. Started with TI-BASIC, then discovered ticalc.org and the shell and assembly programming hacks, games, and home brew transfer cables. It effectively started my electrical engineering and computer science career. I know I’m not alone.
Ah I was a few years later on the TI-86. Around 1999.
Between this, and SNES emulation (searching memory for values and adjusting things to see how they'd affect the game), I was destined for computer science.
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#86The 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 "ER…
That wasn't "leaking stack memory" except in a very literal sense: the BASIC language keeps a stack of the control structures you're inside, so that when you hit an "End" or "Else" statement it knows where to go next. This "stack" of control structures isn't lexically scoped; it's dynamic, based on what control flow commands you've hit. So yes, if you use "Goto" to set up a situation where you're hitting "Then" over and over without ever hitting a corresponding "Else" or "End", the control flow stack will just keep getting deeper and deeper. That's not a "leak" per se: all those "Then" structures are still there, waiting for their "End"s, and will do the natural thing if you give their "End"s to them — even somewhere someone used to lexically scoped languages wouldn't expect. Sometimes you can do cool things with this.
See subsection 2.1 in https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/145/14542.htm...
(I should add that the first image on that page shows one neat effect of non-lexicality: you can put an "Else" statement as the body of an "If", so that it's skipped when the "If"'s condition is false.)
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#87Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
That was me. Algebra clicked for me so I found the pace of the class to be slow. Ended up creating a few programs to solve tedious things like the quadratic formula incrementally while displaying the intermediate steps so I could write them down on tests. Authoring programs using the buttons on the calculator was not fun.
> so I could write them down on tests. We had show our calculator had been memory wiped before any tests. Although in retrospect we only had to show the wipe screen which we probably could have coded up as its own program.
Even though I never cheated, I never wanted my programs to get erased... I just created an image of the "memory erased" screen and showed that to the teachers.
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#89It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.
I got Super Mario onto my TI-89
Re: Boris Cherny: TI-83 Plus Basic Programming Tutorial (2004)
#90It's funny how many software developers got into it due to being bored in class with a TI-83 and randomly trying to create programs.
Says something interesting about education. Exposure to tools had perhaps as much impact than what the high schools were actually teaching .
productive procrastination!