Feoh
Picking up #basic again really is like riding a bike.
It's not the prettiest #programming language, or the most elegant - not by a long shot, but working in it again I'm reminded of what an incredible gateway drug it was for so many of us to a life long love of computing.
There's something super powerful at play here beyond #retro. I do think there are things we could learn from it in modern designs.
Feoh
Atari 8 bit BASIC. The original version, not any of the nicer XL, XE, or Turbo varieties :)
@living8bit
@feoh What system is that? "Graphics 5" and Plot, say #C128, but "stick" and "strig" rule it out.
Feoh
Just a tiny teaser example. I wrote this ugly bugger simple drawing program in < 10m:
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lopta
@feoh @comchia I have used QBASIC and I think GEMBASIC in the past - "modern" variants with labels instead of line numbers and Pascal-style subroutines.
Feoh
@lopta @comchia You don't need to grasp for an 8 bit version just because that's what we've been chatting about! Modern variants are cool too :) Bywater looks pretty neat actually.
lopta
@feoh @comchia Tough question. I think BBC BASIC is well-regarded but in recent years I've used bwbasic.
Feoh
lopta
Comchia
@feoh I took some time to learn some Atari BASIC this past winter, and I found that it helped me understand some concepts more easily in a later Udemy Python class that I took. BASIC was my first language I messed with at all as a kid.
Feoh
@lopta Kind of interesting IMO when you look at what modern BASIC versions are floating around these days:
A) There are a TON of them
B) There are a TON of them that are either 100% commercial or have some free and some commercial bits
BASIC may be the 'cold dark matter' programmer's language of choice :)
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Feoh
@lopta Yeah dealing with the line editor and line numbers is definitely a throwback :) And there's no easy way to renumber either!
Alex@rtnVFRmedia Suffolk UK
TBH for those of us who grew up outside USA (and/or maybe are slightly younger?) even seeing a CP/M machine was rare, you often only got to use machines with hard drives (or even floppies!) at high school, and there were *multiple* different file system standards (Acorn used a dot as a separator for directories, files didn't have any extension).
BBC Basic was very powerful (and the built in assembler was a bonus)
Feoh
@hairylarry Being angry at MSFT in 2022 for decisions they made in 1980 just makes me chortle :)
Sure, I'd have liked it if everyone embraced The One True filesystem / directory structure and The One True POSIX API but, you know, like, life happens and I can't personally be bothered to sweat that level of detail *40 years later* :)
Hairy Larry
@feoh @Wintermute_BBS
I read that stuff. I like to blame microsoft for using the backslash when forward slash was already the standard but I've been told that it was cp/m's fault and microsoft inherited it from them.
Still, no excuse.
Feoh
@Wintermute_BBS Yeah I also don't know that a lot of people know just how deep the CP/M ecosystem was back in the day. I never had a CP/M machine, but I read a *LOT* about them, including Jerry Pournelle's CP/M boxes - named Zeke and I can't rremember what the other was :) in I think Byte or Doctor Dobbs Journal :)
Wintermute_BBS
@feoh it is a fantastic, modular platform. you can turn a simple starter kit into a full blown CP/M beast with sound and graphics capabilities if you so wish. there are plenty of official and 3rd party expansion modules for it.
Feoh
@Wintermute_BBS Microsoft BASIC I'd guess given your pinned tweet. I'd never heard of the RC2014 before. That little board looks VERY neat!
Wintermute_BBS
Feoh
@lopta @vfrmedia @hairylarry For what itβs worth I have never personally laid hands on a CP/M machine myself. Iβve just been reading about them for years and I find them kind of fascinating :-)
lopta
@vfrmedia @feoh @hairylarry Plenty of CP/M machines in the U.K: Logica VTS, Comart, RM, Amstrad CPC/PCW etc.
Linux Walt Alt (@lnxw37a2) {3EB165E0-5BB1-45D2-9E7D-93B31821F864}
Stewart C. Russell
@feoh @lopta Richard Russell's BBC BASIC for SDL 2.0 β https://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/bbcsdl/index.html - is one of the nicest free interpreters. Runs on lots of platforms.
Richard was on the BBC's language committee, wrote the Z80 version (which was roughly contemporary with Acorn's BBC Micro version) and has been supporting it ever since
I have an overly large list of BASIC things, if people care
Stewart C. Russell
@feoh I dunno; BASIC might introduce some simple ideas easily, but there's a lot of it not to like. TBH, CircuitPython on Pygamer hardware or similar might be more instructive
Feoh
@scruss I will say, to your point, that one of the things BASIC and Python/CircuitPython have in common is extreme interactivity and real time feedback loops via a REPL.
I know 1980s BASIC READY prompt doesn't seem like a REPL but it most assuredly is one :)
Feoh
@scruss Awesome! So great to see so many people dipping into the retro well. There really is a LOT of great tech there just lying around waiting to be appreciated and to teach younger folks important things about computing that are even more valuable today in some ways :)
Feoh
@scruss Also I for one would love to see your overly large list of BASIC things :)
Stewart C. Russell
@feoh here you go, then:
https://github.com/scruss/bench64#references-and-resources
Emacsen
> Today it's a Lua interpreter and a program that consumes almost all of the available RAM to draw rectangles on the display of a PineTime smart watch.
A very honest README.
Daniel Barlow
Emacsen
My question is "Is it BASIC, or is it such direct access to the hardware?"
For example, if Lua had been an option, would that have done the same?
Feoh
@emacsen It's a valid question. I think the answer is: maybe? Like I said in a previous reply to someone else, part of BASIC's charm is its REPL. I guess you could easily create a REPL in Lua as well.
So yeah, if you gave me a Lua REPL with direct hardware access to an architecture simple enough to fit in my brain, then I'd probably love it just as much if not more.
Got such a thing lying around? :)
Emacsen
100%, and moreover, while I didn't have an Atari, the Commodore manuals were incredibly friendly and took the new computer owner through the functionality.
Emacsen
I'm not dismissing the importance or innovation of BASIC, or LOGO (which is what I started with on the TI-99).
I consider TIC-80 to be a bit of almost retro-futurism? It's the computer we wanted but never had.
OTOH it doesn't have any kind of significant IO functionality- you can sort of almost hack it in if you bang the registers, but... no :)
Feoh
@emacsen No I get that, and I don't want to come off as glorifying BASIC as somehow being the perfect programming language. ZOMG it isn't.
However over the last year or so I've been really getting back into Atari 8 bit hacking, and I just found myself sitting there at an ATARI BASIC prompt, typing in expressions, making pretty graphics on the screen, and remembering how EASY & welcoming it felt all those years ago to turn on a machine, get a READY prompt, and start exploring.
Feoh
@emacsen Actually thinking about it your choice of comparison to Lua is VERY apt and rather interesting. Lua is a simple language but one that can be incredibly expressive and powerful. So is BASIC, but we can't ignore the fact that Lua's designers had another 30 years of prior art to work from that BASIC's original creators did not :)
In a sense, platforms like PICO-8 and TIC-80 are kind of what we're talking about here, even though they don't strictly speaking exist as hardware.
Emacsen
I didn't actually own a C64, but I did own a VIC 20, and the manual for it is is clearly a computer programming manual written for children.
http://cini.classiccmp.org/pdf/Commodore/VIC-20%20User%27s%20Manual.pdf
Santa Claes πΈπͺππ°π
Feoh
@emacsen Wow that is rather impressive! Back in the days when software and hardware actually came with meaningful documentation and not just a tiny slip of paper with a URL in utterly unreadable tiny text :)
Feoh
@veer66 @emacsen Atari LOGO was the first programming language to really truly blow my mind. Still amazed at the fact that I never ever saw anything like Dynaturtles in any other language and most don't know what I'm talking about when I mention them :)
(You could change the turtle's shape and color and give them velocity & direction, as well as do collision detection between them and other turtles, pixels etc. It was awesome :)
veer66
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