Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/27/retro_week_basic_instinct/)
retro reminiscing. 8)
Commodore 64 is 30 today
Let that sink in for a moment :)
Have a nice day :)
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 02, 2012, 08:29:01 AM
Commodore 64 is 30 today
Let that sink in for a moment :)
Have a nice day :)
Yeesh, 30 million units over 11 years! http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=98
btw reminds me, anyone else from the Edmonton area that remembers a local show in the 1980s that would sometimes come on (Shaw Cable 10 I think) where they played computer games on a C64 ... and the opening theme music was (I kid you not) The Beatles' "When I'm 64" ?
Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 02, 2012, 09:57:03 AM
Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)
One ep I distinctly recall had them playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission
^ oh great, now I've just clicked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epyx and I'm in total click-click (http://planetromero.com/gotcha/epyx.htm) flashback mode... I guess I'm due for my morning break ::)
lol remember some of the old "box art" on games? that totally raised your expectations to unrealistic levels?
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f1/Barbarian_-_The_Ultimate_Warrior_Coverart.png)
and JEEPERS I so do miss the ol' arcade...
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/quartet/quartet.htm
Ah the golden age of quarter-munchers, when graphics were cooler there than what you could find @ home ... but many of the games were a decent difficulty level and eventually could earn you 30+ minutes of amusement on a single coin.
Quote from: Darren Dirt on August 02, 2012, 10:04:35 AM
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 02, 2012, 09:57:03 AM
Oh god, I remember that, right when we first moved here ('84/'85?)
One ep I distinctly recall had them playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_Mission
Neat it's on the Wii Virtual Console!
Quote from: Darren Dirt on August 01, 2012, 10:49:57 PM
Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/27/retro_week_basic_instinct/)
Here's the actual point to the three-page article:
Quote
It's a common belief that it was the death of the 1980s hobbyist scene, due to cheaper games consoles initially and online gaming latterly, that caused the clear and marked decline in prospective IT undergraduates and employees.
So... There was a clear and marked decline in prospective IT undergraduates and employees? Maybe the increase in IT jobs outpaced the increase in people learning IT?
True dat. But also it became more difficult for someone to just 'pick it up' over a weekend with a single book from the library. Soon it turned into needing layers of APIs to do the simplest thing (e.g. draw a happy face on screen and make it move nsew based on a keyboard press), and eventually joat was replaced by countless niche skill sets.
Although Mayor Bloomberg seems to be on the optimism side of the fence here. So maybe my perspective is curmudgeony aka 'back when I was a kid it was so much easier to...'
Speaking of that bolded word ^ , anyone else find themselves nodding TONS while reading the comments to the article? #notsureifgoodthing
No, you can still make crappy little programs that do almost nothing and look like shyte. These "toddler scrawlings", when compared to the highly-polished games and programs created today, simply aren't as interesting because they're orders of magnitude further apart in form and function.
Quote from: Thorin on August 06, 2012, 05:32:10 PM
No, you can still make crappy little programs that do almost nothing and look like shyte. These "toddler scrawlings", when compared to the highly-polished games and programs created today, simply aren't as interesting because they're orders of magnitude further apart in form and function.
And yet, Minecraft. ;D
I think you're implying Minecraft is like a toddler scrawl. I really don't think the amount or type of code put into Minecraft is anywhere near as simple as the amount or type of code put into what we as eleven year olds might have typed in as one of our first forty programs in BASIC.
Quote from: Thorin on August 06, 2012, 10:28:00 PM
I think you're implying Minecraft is like a toddler scrawl. I really don't think the amount or type of code put into Minecraft is anywhere near as simple as the amount or type of code put into what we as eleven year olds might have typed in as one of our first forty programs in BASIC.
No of course not. There's a LOT of code in there. But then amount of code isn't exactly a benchmark of quality.
I was just trying to say that something that is an order of magnitude (or more) less polished than something else can still make it.
There are piles of flash games still out there that people love and many of those have very simple code.
to clarify, imo the point of the article (and the reason I posted it) is captured in much of the COMMENTS in the article -- how BASIC opened the door for countless developers, hooked them in via its simplicity and "instant feedback" attribute. The Golden Days with INPUT Magazine and Compute! Magazine having code you could type in and get something working, that was a gamechanger, gone were punchcards and PhD-level mathematics and algorithms required to "program". Read all the comments how many remember taking a weekend to fly through the "orange book", the Sinclair BASIC manual which apparently had really good examples and got people to "click" with the whole "I can do this!" mentality. Allowing for the obvious deficiencies of BASIC, it still was the "starter" for a lot of very good developers, who are still working in the IT field, including yours truly. There really was something special about those early days of my programming life, using some DATA statements to fill in a string that would replace an ASCII character with a happy face or a gun aka "redefining the character set", or using PUT$ to this combo of numbers onto the screen at an exact X,Y co-ordinate, a hacked version of a "sprite", whee! All without even needing a graphics program, heck not even a mouse.
Contrast that with today, folks thinking HTML+Javascript = programming, sure it is in a way, but there's just so many layers of abstraction from the basic structures within the OS/CPU... back in the early days of BASIC in the *home* (that was a big deal, not needing to be an engineer to actually make your computer DO STUFF) you pretty quickly learned which PEEKs and POKEs did cool things (direct access to pixels or keyboard functions, sounds, floppy drive motor on/off etc.) and that got you closer to understanding what's "under the hood", and thinking logically, paving the way for solid Pascal and C/C++ programmers to explode into the workplace. There isn't an equivalent toolset out there now for the next generation of young 'uns. That's the gist (imo).
Based on the first post in this thread:
Quote from: Darren Dirt on August 01, 2012, 10:49:57 PM
Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/27/retro_week_basic_instinct/)
retro reminiscing. 8)
I didn't realize you were actually referring to the _comments_ on the article rather than the article itself, so thanks for that clarification. Maybe say that explicitly next time, though.
As a rule I tend not to read all the comments as there is so much fluff compared to useful comments and there are so many comments on the internet that I could never read them all in my lifetime.
Quote from: Thorin on August 07, 2012, 10:18:22 AM
Based on the first post in this thread:
Quote from: Darren Dirt on August 01, 2012, 10:49:57 PM
Basic instinct: how we used to code -- In praise of Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (http://www.reghardware.com/2012/04/27/retro_week_basic_instinct/)
retro reminiscing. 8)
I didn't realize you were actually referring to the _comments_ on the article rather than the article itself, so thanks for that clarification. Maybe say that explicitly next time, though.
As a rule I tend not to read all the comments as there is so much fluff compared to useful comments and there are so many comments on the internet that I could never read them all in my lifetime.
To clarify my clarifying... I actually posted the thread originally upon finding the article, and then only afterwards realized how awesome the comments were, i.e. Trip Down Memory Lane for many of us RW'ers.
I think a later post ITT i mentioned the comments... only in hindsight would I say they are the greater value of the article, compared to its actual contents.
Quote from: Lazybones on August 07, 2012, 01:04:16 AM
There are piles of flash games still out there that people love and many of those have very simple code.
Yay, EWD would be glad.
"the Romans have taught us "Simplex Veri Sigillum" ? that is: simplicity is the hallmark of truth? we should know better, but complexity continues to have a morbid attraction."
- Edsger W. Dijkstra (1984,
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD898.html )
Uhh, HTML + Javascript is coding, actually
http://jquery.com/
http://yuilibrary.com/
http://prototypejs.org/
http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/
Great way to learn? Get on JS Bin with someone experienced and pair up:
http://jsbin.com/
Anyway, I think now is a much better time to learn how to code than ever (because Google), the availability of computers and free frameworks to play with also help. The one thing I'm sure has changed is the "wow" factor of it, making words appear on a screen doesn't exactly excite kids the same way it did 30 odd years ago LOL
Mind you today there are kids playing with robotics in the form of Lego, and that's cool with a capital Fonzie.
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 08, 2012, 11:58:53 AM
Uhh, HTML + Javascript is coding, actually
Duh @ your Uhh ... but it's not exactly "entry level simplicity and instant WOW" is it?
1. which is more intimidating to a child/adolescent who is driven by a "hey I want to learn to program"...
a) http://jsbin.com/welcome/1/edit
b) (http://del.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d32ef53ef011168a1b085970c-500wi)
2. bonus question: and which is more likely to get the viewer thinking (and acting on!) "I think I can guess what happens if I change
this part..." <-- that's the thing that got me hooked into this damn beautiful industry (as well as many other Compute! or INPUT magazine readers)
As we're no longer children we aren't capable of answering that question
I can remember sitting at the old C64 prompt and not knowing where to even get started, it wasn't until I got help that things opened up.
So yeah, if I was given the choice of sitting at a prompt with no help or collaboratively coding with someone else I'd pick the latter... :)
1.b. looks (functionally) like HTML to me, which for your bonus question has the same "wonder what happens if I change this" factor.
And I'm pretty sure that it takes a certain personality to want to learn code, whether it was spaghetti BASIC or nice new jQuery.
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 08, 2012, 12:38:33 PM
As we're no longer children we aren't capable of answering that question
I can remember sitting at the old C64 prompt and not knowing where to even get started, it wasn't until I got help that things opened up.
So yeah, if I was given the choice of sitting at a prompt with no help or collaboratively coding with someone else I'd pick the latter... :)
That's why I picked the Apple ][ prompt -- instead of the C64 "blank page". Obviously anything needs help/manuals to tell the budding developer how to do stuff. But the Apple ][ prompt and similar would have it right in your face the simple code and its simple and immediate result --> pique the curiosity of a young 'un, a few key presses and the computer TALKS to you... now what? (old school generation would be excited by that, anyway -- see my lament ala "Halo in an afternoon" below).
Quote from: Thorin on August 08, 2012, 01:22:49 PM
1.b. looks (functionally) like HTML to me, which for your bonus question has the same "wonder what happens if I change this" factor.
Sure,
now. But what about to a nine year old who has not ever looked at source code of any kind? And which would they feel more welcome to modify and have a good guess what the result woudl be?
I guess my point isn't very clear -- the shallow learning curve of the 1980s (and early 1990s) is no longer, as pointed out ITT the bar is higher for a "WOW" response, which means even if someone gives their kid a C64 with BASIC it is less likely to be attractive to them unless they can build Halo or similar in an afternoon. #sad #illgetoverit #threadkindadyinganyway
I dunno, this reminds me of a question posted on /. about how to get someone interested in Star Trek
You can lead a horse to water and all that jazz...
Quote from: Darren Dirt on August 08, 2012, 01:31:03 PM
Quote from: Thorin on August 08, 2012, 01:22:49 PM
1.b. looks (functionally) like HTML to me, which for your bonus question has the same "wonder what happens if I change this" factor.
Sure, now. But what about to a nine year old who has not ever looked at source code of any kind? And which would they feel more welcome to modify and have a good guess what the result woudl be?
I guess my point isn't very clear -- the shallow learning curve of the 1980s (and early 1990s) is no longer, as pointed out ITT the bar is higher for a "WOW" response, which means even if someone gives their kid a C64 with BASIC it is less likely to be attractive to them unless they can build Halo or similar in an afternoon. #sad #illgetoverit #threadkindadyinganyway
Well I can answer that one from experience - I think my son was ten when he wanted to try HTML. I showed him the absolute basics (tags begin with
< and end with
>, further help can be found on w3schools.org), and he spent hours trying out different things, including image manipulation. He was quite proud of what he'd accomplished and did show it to his friends. They were as impressed as my friends were with my first BASIC program - that is, they weren't wowed, mostly because neither his friends now nor my friends back then really knew how much work it was to make something look good.
I think this thread's at a point where you've decided your opinion and won't sway from it; if that's the case, then the thread is probably dying, as it seems the rest of us don't agree with your opinion on whether the good old days were better or not.
Oh, and my son isn't necessarily interested in programming now but he's certainly into computers and at times the
details of computers.
Quote from: Mr. Analog on August 08, 2012, 11:58:53 AM
Great way to learn? Get on JS Bin with someone experienced and pair up:
http://jsbin.com/
I found a tool today that is kinda similar in usefulness/quickness to the above, let's you edit/test various "kinds" of code really easily (i.e. instant results)
http://jsfiddle.net/
Quote from: http://doc.jsfiddle.net/
JsFiddle is a playground for web developers, a tool which may be used in many ways. One can use it as an online editor for snippets build from HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The code can then be shared with others, embedded on a blog, etc. Using this approach, JavaScript developers can very easily isolate bugs. We aim to support all actively developed frameworks - it helps with testing compatibility.
Add that to your list of handy coding tools, right next to whatever web-based RegExp Tester you prefer.
RegExes are _hell_ to maintain.
JSFiddle's pretty cool, though :)
Quote from: Thorin on September 04, 2012, 09:49:18 AM
RegExes are _hell_ to maintain.
hence the importance to take advantage of stuff you find with this Google search...
http://www.google.com/search?q=web-based+RegExp+Tester