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posted by
martyb
on Sunday December 24 2017, @09:23PM
from the when-computer-magazines-had-over-500-pages-and-we-read-them-FOR-the-ads dept.
from the when-computer-magazines-had-over-500-pages-and-we-read-them-FOR-the-ads dept.
A digital archive of BYTE Magazine covering 1975 through 1995 is online now at the Internet Archive. BYTE was a very influential magazine its first decades and included articles and columns on both hardware and software, basically everything in the topic of small computers and software. A broad range of operating systems were addressed as well. Any of the programming languages available at the time were regularly covered, Smalltalk, Lisp, Logo, basically anything. And of course source samples and occasionally whole programs were included. It basically lead in the era of hands-on computing.
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BYTE Magazine Archive 1975 - 1995
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Xerox does it again and again and again and ...
(Score: 1) by anubi on Monday December 25 2017, @07:17AM (2 children)
BASIC was fine for a beginner's introduction - and I mean it in the way one uses a hand calculator. I felt ( and still do ) that it makes a great programmable calculator.
But its usefulness drops off sharply as program complexity increases.
I found anything over maybe 10 pages of code or so to be nearly unmaintainable in BASIC.
To get around this bottleneck, I made lots of SHELL calls. Passing arguments through filesets. Quite cumbersome, but at least it isolated the scope of my variables.
Then I learned C / C++.
Now, that's the language I quickly learned to love. It let me do it all. From the little-bitty assembler stuff to the overall system. It was such a removal of burden to not have to deal with peeks, pokes, then shell stuff out here and there trying to keep everyone in their proper cages, as C was so much better at managing the scope of my variables.
Not only that, the library architecture of the C family made it so easy to compartmentalize that which I knew was already running fine, letting me store most of my code in convenient places to avoid cluttering up all my code with support code. This made it so easy to make reusable code, like drivers for various interfaces.
I won't say that BASIC will ruin a programmer, but I will say its a really nice language to try out a small math algorithm, but its a really poor choice for trying to code anything bigger than a sheet or two of code.
I still use GWBasic a lot! ( Yes, I use DOS too. Its quick and dirty when I just want to play around with an algorithm or checkout some simple interface ).
Now, Basic is great for letting me check out something like my fuel consumption/mileage/estimated cost to top-off-tank calculator I am coding for my van. It's an adaptive program where it learns how much fuel I am using under various circumstance of what gear I am in, engine RPM, vehicle speed, and throttle-position sensor. If I top off the tank, when I get back in the van, I key into the system how much fuel I put in. It uses my history of top-offs to generate more and more accurate estimates of how much it will take to top off again. If I should key in the price of fuel I am seeing... it will display how much I should expect to pay for the next top-off, so I can tender the appropriate amount at the register so I don't have to go back for more, or go back for change. I am dry-labbing it in Basic before I hard-program it in the van's Arduino.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Monday December 25 2017, @08:29AM
To a large extent, I agree with you. I think though that if and when a programmer feels ready to take on a project of that size and complexity, they should also feel ready to quickly pick up and embrace other languages. If they stubbornly stick with only ever BASIC (and I should probably include VB6 in that) even after years of experience, I'd say the problems lie outside of the computer and not with BASIC itself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 25 2017, @09:22PM
I revamped a BBS program in BASIC, it was in pretty bad shape when I started on it - far more than 10 pages of code. It was still big when I was done, but organizing it logically and identifying bottlenecks and cleaning those up I did manage to make it run much faster and crash much less often - I got it reliable enough to serve an active message community (via 1200 baud modem) for months without crashing.
🌻🌻 [google.com]