Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)

#91

Post by snvzz » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 3:16 AM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #76

The article delves only very shallowly into programming, so it stays away from this problem, but Commodore 64 BASIC is fundamentally unsuitable for programming anything larger than a few lines of code. The most widely used version of Basic which Commodore (and other) platforms used does not have functions . This makes Basic programs tend to spaghetti and unreadable code, especially considering the constant memory con…

How bad Commodore 64's (most sold computer ever) BASIC was cannot be overstated.

Great to power on and have the immediate mode prompt, great for learning the basics, sufficient for trivial tasks, but that's about it.

Moving away from BASIC into assembly was how you'd get things done in that machine.

Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)

#92

Post by teddyh » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 11:43 AM UTC

lproven wrote: post #90

teddyh wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a UK-centric perspective. The rest of Europe did not, by and large, use Spectrums or BBC Micros; they all mostly used Commodore 64s. (I am not an American.) AFAIK, Americans mostly used Apple ][, not Commodore, which also had the Microsoft BASIC without named functions, IIUC.

> The rest of Europe [...] mostly used Commodore 64s. I don't think that's true. I was a teenager in the 1980s; I had one (1) friend with a C64. The only other person at university with their own computer was, like mine, a ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum 128 was designed in Spain by Investronica in Spain, and first sold in Spain: https://medium.com/@uto_dev/the-awakening-of-the-spectrum-12... In Portugal, they also had the…

There existed a huge number of home computer models, and they all had a tiny portion of the market, and many countries had their own little brand. But what most people used, especially in the mid-1980s, was predominantly Commodore 64s, from what I remember. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was Amigas and Atari ST’s for a while, and then IBM-compatible PCs took over.

But even if I remember that incorrectly, how large a part of users had a computer with a sensible version of BASIC? I submit that it was vanishingly small; possibly only the UK had any large user base of computers with a reasonable version of BASIC. For most other people, BASIC did not have functions. And therefore, following the lowest common denominator, neither did program listings in magazines, etc.

Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)

#93

Post by lproven » Wed, Mar 22, 2023, 3:58 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #92

lproven wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rest of Europe [...] mostly used Commodore 64s. I don't think that's true. I was a teenager in the 1980s; I had one (1) friend with a C64. The only other person at university with their own computer was, like mine, a ZX Spectrum. The Spectrum 128 was designed in Spain by Investronica in Spain, and first sold in Spain: https://medium.com/@uto_dev/the-awakening-of-the-spectrum-12... In Portugal, they also had the…

There existed a huge number of home computer models, and they all had a tiny portion of the market, and many countries had their own little brand. But what most people used , especially in the mid-1980s, was predominantly Commodore 64s, from what I remember. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was Amigas and Atari ST’s for a while, and then IBM-compatible PCs took over. But even if I remember that incorrectly, how l…

I disagree, but it seems that mere evidence isn't going to sway you, so I doubt anything will.

Basically every home computer had a better BASIC than the C64, including GW-BASIC, and most people I knew personally didn't use C64s. It was built as a games machine and nothing else, with a poor BASIC, poor, slow, low-capacity and very expensive floppy disk drives. And the machine was expensive too in the early days.

Maybe your family and your friends' families were rich. Mine weren't. We couldn't afford £500 American toys. We had sub-£200 machines, with better BASICs, and we loved the things. Kids of rich British families had BBC Micros and looked down on us.