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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : Honoring BASIC
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| grunto Newbie  Joined: 07/01/2015 Location: AustraliaPosts: 15 |
Saw this and thought it might be of interest. Waiting to see who is the first one to get their photo taken with the sign!! The BASIC Sign |
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| Boppa Guru  Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
LOL, now that I would like to do... |
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Chopperp Guru Joined: 03/01/2018 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1106 |
The comments submitted at the end make interesting reading!!!! Each to is own. From my P.O.V., I had a couple of goes at "C" & got absolutely no where. Some of it was due to poor teaching. I did OK (I think) first doing basic on my VIC20 & assembler with PICF84's & now having quite a bit of fun with MMBasic although the latter is beginning to lose some of it's original BASICness. ChopperP |
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| Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 816 |
I started with basic on an Apple2+ at school and had a string of home computers (vic20, Microbee, C64 and others) before moving onto the IBM's Basic definitely was far easier (I learned Fortran later as well as diving into assembler on the Apple) but there was no way I would have recommended anything other than Basic for a rank beginner Sure it has its flaws and limits, but so does every other programming language... (writing code in hexdec- definitely NOT for a beginners first program LOL)  |
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| JohnS Guru Joined: 18/11/2011 Location: United KingdomPosts: 4135 |
If the original BASIC had block-structuring (IF THEN ELSE / WHILE / CASE / etc) it would probably not have been criticised so much. That is I feel unfair since they were probably just trying to create an easily-learned variant of FORTRAN to squeeze into a small machine. (It's a pity they didn't grab block-structured things from Algol 60, but hey stuff happens.) (FORTRAN had and has many good features but they can be tough to learn and somewhat unintuitive, particularly the variant then-existing which I think would have been FORTRAN II. FORTRAN in that era also lacked decent block-structuring.) Once the block-structuring is added both languages gain much (but FORTRAN is still much harder to learn well). C has a rather different target audience (mainly, people writing code all the time) and machine environment (speed / size / etc). May as well compare apples & oranges. MMBasic now has evolved well beyond the original (Dartmouth) BASIC. John |
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| lizby Guru Joined: 17/05/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 3470 |
My order of learning was Fortran, COBOL, IBM 360/370 assembly language, 8080/Z80 asm, 68000 asm, C, and only Basic in the 90s once Visual Basic could access SQL databases. And it's pretty much been Basic ever since on ever smaller and more powerful and cheaper devices (except for bits of Lua, PHP, javascript). Love the ARMmite F4--fast MMBasic with lots of I/O and SD card, LCD support, and RTC on board for ~$10. With a current monitor on it, it has yet to crack 20mA (except 170 with LCD). PicoMite, Armmite F4, SensorKits, MMBasic Hardware, Games, etc. on fruitoftheshed |
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| Paul_L Guru Joined: 03/03/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 769 |
Looks like I'm older than any of you. I started out with a joint Cornell/IBM project to write the first assembler for the IBM 1401 in 1957, two years before the 1401 was announced. We wrote it and simulated the 1401 on a 704. I learned FORTRAN and COBOL before they had numbers. I drove up to Dartmouth in 1964, met John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, and played with BASIC. It was patterned on FORTRAN II but it replaced the idiosyncratic FORTRAN loop instruction [DO 100, I = 1, 10, 2] (HUH!) with [FOR I=1 TO 10 STEP 1]. I was most interested in the fact that it was running on a GE-225 mini computer and used a Datanet 30 processor to handle communications with 10 Teletype 33 printers for input and output. This required an operating system to partition cpu memory into individual sandboxes and to allocate time slices for each i/o stream, the Dartmouth Time Sharing System - DTSS, which was a bigger job than the BASIC interpreter itself. By the time I saw it it was able to process single commands in interactive mode in addition to editing and saving line numbered programs in core (RAM) memory. It still couldn't save the program to non-volatile media. Later that year they enabled it to write a program out to and to read a program in from Hollerith cards. So I sat down at a teletype machine and typed [? PRINT "HI PAUL!"] pressed return and it printed "HI PAUL!". Then I typed [NEW "PAUL1.BAS"] return -- [10 FOR I=1 TO 100] return -- [20 PRINT I, I*10] return -- [30 NEXT I] return -- SAVE. It replied "PAUL1.BAS SAVED". I typed [RUN PAUL1.BAS] return. It ran!!! While I was doing all this 6 other guys were simultaneously banging away at other teletypes!!! No hollerith cards. No scheduling time on the machine. No compile - link cycle. No debugging hassles. It was a miracle. Within a few years this thing was running on dozens of DEC PDP-8s, PDP-11s, Data General Novas and HP2000 minis. I'm just too damn old!!! Paul in NY |
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| isochronic Guru Joined: 21/01/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 689 |
Heh ! Heh ! Is that a bug ?!! maybe STEP 2 .. I always thought Basic was a bad influence !!!  Edit - Caveat - None of my programs ever had any bugs cough splutter All joking aside, certainly the user-friendliness of Basic gave IT a jump start. There should be more visibility of the development of these things I think. It is discouraging (to me at least) to see the mindset of net software development as it races on, the idea of state and transactions seem to be almost abandoned. Even Oracle had a visual basic type product, it was called Oracle Power Objects. Kind of cute but it incorporated object orientation, multiple inheritance, and the data objects had direct connectivity to Oracle data servers..extreme grunt.. sadly the main developer died and it was decided not to tread on toes further with Microsoft. Pity but. Where do people think the future is ? Perhaps a new thread topic. I have been starting to look at a thing called WebAssembly which might be of interest - you can compile a C program so that it runs in a browser. But the last I saw, a nonresult eg NaN (Not a Number) returned from say a failed calculation, was/had to be simply ignored by the code ... hhmm. If you talk of strong typing to newish programmers they hardly know what it means; they do not learn from the past enough. |
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