Super interesting piece from @sjvn for #ZDNet about the 60th anniversary of the #BASIC programming language - and how it paved the way for other developments at Apple and Microsoft.
When I decided to try to build up some development momentum by restarting the Ray Tracing Challenge but with Dart/Flutter it was a toss up between that idea and deep diving into some retro coding on an Apple II. I briefly thought, "Why not do both?" Har har har. Well, it turns out someone did just that. A ray tracer in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum. #RetroComputing#RetroGaming#programming#ZXSpectrum#BASICgabrielgambetta.com/zx-raytrac…
#BASIC#ProgrammingLanguages#ComputerScience: "Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades."
#BASIC turns 60 today! Happy birthday from the PCjr. Sometimes, I wonder what path my life would have diverged into if I had never had access to a computer and a book on BASIC programming as a kid.
The image/source is originally from Icons & Images by Elmer Larsen from 1985. I typed it in and tweaked it with PC-BASIC, then transferred it to a working PCjr with a gotek floppy drive.
Olde Hansen, who recently published his book on the history of #BASIC#programming in Germany added an online essay about the history of the language itself to an online history magazine:
I asked ChatGPT and another AI to generate qbsh scripts and even gave it commands like CALC and PIP to incorporate. It clearly had bash in the crunchbang. When I suggested it wasn't qbsh, it apologized, removed that line and told me it was more using correct syntax and not "bash built-ins" and hallucinated qbsh commands that don't exist like GREP. It was pretty hilarious.
Close to none of this is true whatsoever. It was partly inspired by #Commodore64, but also by CP/M. And while #qbsh does support basic scripting, it is very much not BASIC compatible with any retro BASIC platform.
qbsh won't teach you to program in #BASIC by using it, even though it is #opensource and written in QBASIC, but to that end, qbsh won't teach you how to code in BASIC any more than #bash will teach you to code in C.
A weird thing about being 50 is that there are programming languages that I've used regularly for longer than some of the software developers I work with have been alive. I first wrote BASIC code in the 1980s. The first time I wrote an expression evaluator--a fairly standard programming puzzle or homework--was in 1990. I wrote it in Pascal for an undergraduate homework assignment. I first wrote perl in the early 1990s, when it was still perl 4.036 (5.38.2 now). I first wrote java in 1995-ish, when it was still java 1.0 (1.21 now). I first wrote scala, which I still use for most things today, in 2013-ish, when it was still scala 2.8 (3.4.0 now). At various times I've been "fluent" in 8086 assembly, BASIC, C, Pascal, perl, python, java, scala; and passable in LISP/Scheme, Prolog, old school Mathematica, (early days) Objective C, matlab/octave, and R. I've written a few lines of Fortran and more than a few lines of COBOL that I ran in a production system once. I could probably write a bit of Haskell if pressed but for some reason I really dislike its syntax so I've never been enthusiastic about learning it well. I've experimented with Clean, Flix, Curry, Unison, Factor, and Joy and learned bits and pieces of each of those. I'm trying to decide whether I should try learning Idris, Agda, and/or Lean. I'm pretty sure I'm forgetting a few languages. Bit of 6502 assembly long ago. Bit of Unix/Linux shell scripting languages (old enough to have lived and breathed tcsh before switching to bash; I use fish now mostly).
When I say passable: in graduate school I wrote a Prolog interpreter in java (including parsing source code or REPL input), within which I could run the classic examples like append or (very simple) symbolic differentiation/integration. As an undergraduate I wrote a Mathematica program to solve the word recognition problem for context-free formal languages. But I'd need some study time to be able to write these languages again.
I don't know what the hell prompted me to reminisce about programming languages. I hope it doesn't come off as a humblebrag but rather like old guy spinning yarns. I think I've been through so many because I'm never quite happy with any one of them and because I've had a varied career that started when I was pretty young.
I guess I'm also half hoping to find people on here who have similar interests so I'm going to riddle this post with hashtags:
#Introduction: Hello, I am #new here! I was on #Diaspora for quite a few years but it was a very small community. Mastodon seems larger and more dynamic.
I'm mainly here to chat about #RPG games. I have been playing #DnD since the #1980s, starting with Moldvay #Basic and Keep on the Borderlands. These days I am mostly playing #DCC, but also enjoy Call of #Cthulhu, Traveller and #OSR games.
Besides #RPGs, I like British comics, especially #2000AD and its spin-offs. And #cycling.
It's a sort of #retrocomputer BASIC running on a modern microcontroller. It talks VGA and stuff.
I was thinking of getting some boards made: the current design is all pre-made SMD using an RP2040. It would be nice if some folks in #Canada wanted some to cut costs
I have way too many games to ever play, but still I can't help it. Today's haul: Othello (NES), Spinball (Vectrex), Colossal Cave Adventure (PS5), Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars (GBA). Read on for more details
I'm pleased to announce that #qbsh has a new release! Version 1.1.0 is out with significant improvements in the shell pipe handling for interactive CLI programs like vim.
Talking about #retrocomputing things... Here a program I wrote on September 2015 with my first computer. That Commodore Vic-20 is now 40 years old, has 3.5 Kb of RAM and last time I tried it was still working :-) #creativeCoding#tumblr#petscii#basic#asciiart#8bit