Jonny Codes.
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Earlier today, one of my younger brothers interviewed me for a class he's taking. He asked me what I do for a living, why I got into programming, what I like about my job, what I don't like, and whether I prefer Vim or Emacs. It was an entertaining little conversation. My brother is 20 years old. I don't know that he's ever used BASIC. And frankly, the only reason he might have would be a robotics project or two, where you can still find BASIC interpreters crammed onto ROM in the kits handed out to students. Heck, BASIC - the classic teaching language with line numbers and GOTO, the language twisted and forced onto countless budding programmers when "microcomputer" was still a term used without irony - had already become something of an anachronism when I was learning to program in the early '90s. I do know that my brother has written assembler code for a Game Boy Advance. That he knows how to install and configure Linux, and set up a LAN. That he can discuss the pros and cons of different processor architectures, and comment intelligently on the trials and tribulations involved in making two very different pieces of software, written using very different languages and libraries, communicate with each other. I don't know what path his life will take, whether it will involve a career in programming or not, much less what languages he'll end up using. But I'm confident he'll have little trouble adapting to whatever comes his way. Same as the rest of us did, to the bizarre and oft-frustrating technologies we encountered...
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Earlier today, one of my younger brothers interviewed me for a class he's taking. He asked me what I do for a living, why I got into programming, what I like about my job, what I don't like, and whether I prefer Vim or Emacs. It was an entertaining little conversation. My brother is 20 years old. I don't know that he's ever used BASIC. And frankly, the only reason he might have would be a robotics project or two, where you can still find BASIC interpreters crammed onto ROM in the kits handed out to students. Heck, BASIC - the classic teaching language with line numbers and GOTO, the language twisted and forced onto countless budding programmers when "microcomputer" was still a term used without irony - had already become something of an anachronism when I was learning to program in the early '90s. I do know that my brother has written assembler code for a Game Boy Advance. That he knows how to install and configure Linux, and set up a LAN. That he can discuss the pros and cons of different processor architectures, and comment intelligently on the trials and tribulations involved in making two very different pieces of software, written using very different languages and libraries, communicate with each other. I don't know what path his life will take, whether it will involve a career in programming or not, much less what languages he'll end up using. But I'm confident he'll have little trouble adapting to whatever comes his way. Same as the rest of us did, to the bizarre and oft-frustrating technologies we encountered...
Shog9 wrote:
Heck, BASIC - the classic teaching language with line numbers and GOTO, the language twisted and forced onto countless budding programmers when "microcomputer" was still a term used without irony - had already become something of an anachronism when I was learning to program in the early '90s.
I could see it was horribly limited when I started programming my ZX Spectrum[^] in the mid 80s - that's why I used a) BASIC extensions giving structured programming constructs (while loops! parameters for subroutines! proper IF statements!), b) third party PASCAL and C compilers, or c) an assembler. c) was the option that got used most on the Speccy :-)
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
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Shog9 wrote:
Heck, BASIC - the classic teaching language with line numbers and GOTO, the language twisted and forced onto countless budding programmers when "microcomputer" was still a term used without irony - had already become something of an anachronism when I was learning to program in the early '90s.
I could see it was horribly limited when I started programming my ZX Spectrum[^] in the mid 80s - that's why I used a) BASIC extensions giving structured programming constructs (while loops! parameters for subroutines! proper IF statements!), b) third party PASCAL and C compilers, or c) an assembler. c) was the option that got used most on the Speccy :-)
Java, Basic, who cares - it's all a bunch of tree-hugging hippy cr*p
Stuart Dootson wrote:
I could see it was horribly limited when I started programming my ZX Spectrum[^] in the mid 80s
Ooh! Sinclair BASIC! COLOR statements! Ah, the memories!
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!