2014-05-04 17:07:36.314577+00 by Dan Lyke 2 comments
So BASIC turned 50 this week, and I thought this was a particularly good reminder of what's happened to computer usability over the few decades I've been playing with them. RT MacUser @macusermagazine:
To program your Commodore 64, 1982: switch on.
To program your Mac, 2014: https://developer.apple.com/li...SX/chapters/01_Introduction.html
Progress.
#basic50
[ related topics: Language Apple Computer Books Software Engineering Macintosh ]
comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):
#Comment Re: made: 2014-05-04 21:29:19.261715+00 by: markd [edit history]
To be fair, if you wanted to program the C64 professionally, you'd probably need an assembler, a floppy drive or two to load said assembler and save your code, a decent editor, some good reference books, etc... I know some of the big games were cross-compiled from other systems (I think Ozark Softscape had a PDP-11 for that, for things like M.U.L.E. and Seven Cities of Gold)
I've been calling the web browser the New BASIC. I've seen kids edit stuff in NotePad then run it in a browser for some of that great
10 PRINT "BORK RULES"
20 GOTO 10
kind of instant-feedback.
#Comment Re: made: 2014-05-05 16:44:56.824191+00 by: Dan Lyke
I really wish Apple had continued to support HyperCard. That was the closest thing to "Here's a BASIC command prompt" for a GUI system that I've seen, deep enough data structures that Robert Wilson and I once implemented Huffman compression in it, but point-and-clicky enough that it was like sitting down and typing PRINT "Hello World".
I don't like JavaScript much as a language, but, yeah, I think Notepad+browser is the closest thing we have to that environment, and NodeJS might be the final piece in the puzzle to get back to a programming environment everywhere, as the tools for it mature.