Retro Computing (on Steroids)

If the hardware had been better things would have been a lot easier, the industry had a lot of limitations forced upon it and worked hard to overcome them

I paid 200 quid for 8MB of extra ram in my 1600 quid 1GB HDD computer, so almost 2k out of the 30k I got for a 2 bedroom flat in Edinburgh went on my new Windows 3.1 wundermachine

Old-school BASIC did have significant problems that stopped anyone writing good code with it. The best you could do was code that worked and was as good as the language would allow. I'd say those problems have been greatly reduced now.

I recommended one of our users try out a MicroMite for talking to a small grain silo he has. He's already used an Arduino for a pneumatic gate system for sorting sheep so he's technically very capable, but I thought the MicoMite with it's more immediate programming model might be a nice change.

If my kids were at all interested in programming I'd probably get one. I think it's a great project.

But I still mourn the simplicity the old 80s micros had, hardware wise.

The range of languages available is driven by demand, not hardware compatibility. It can be as random as one guy decides to write an operating system kernel for fun which then goes on to run most of the world's computers so lots of people keep its implementation language alive (straight C) or another decides he wants to write a language and it get popular for some reason (Python). Java was one of the, these days, more rare industry driven examples of a language getting popular. Marketing, the interpreted write-one-run-anywhere feature, and the fact it was actually a mostly better C/C++ for application level coding meant it took off. It's largely considered the COBOL of the 21st century which I think is unfair. COBOL is still the COBOL of the 21st century anyway!

I was never a programmer, rather a scientist. But in the seventies(and eighties) there was little available application software suitable for our calculation and dabbling at BASIC to get an error free result was common. Every laboratory seemed to have at least one person who would manage to create a simple program to do the tedious calculations. And at that level BASIC was a reasonably useful programming language.

But i went on to attempt to create a program to record requests, accept results and print reports for an analytical medical laboratory. BASIC was chosen because that was all available on the HP computer available. Is was complemented by a very good Assembler but everything depended on the BASIC program. And , did that program, which was essentially a specialised data base management application, highlight the severe deficiencies of BASIC. It really is totally unsuitable for any sort of structured development. Even with the exclusion, where possible , of GOTO and only using labelled GOSUB routines it was still a nightmare. I have no way of knowing , but I suspect it was one of the largest BASIC program ever written and used continuously. It was always under development. Any real programmer would have know not to attempt such a large project using BASIC.

Thankfully I have left that drama well behind. But if I need to code a small , or large, program I tend to go to either C# (windows) or Java(only for Android) never BASIC. While my preference is for C# I much taken with the ubiquity of the mobile phone. and find anything coded for Android is usually more useful. Of course Google have decided that the preferred language is now Kotlin instead of Java but i am not too sure i could bother learning something knew. I can accept Dave and David's assurance that Python is marvellous but its' benefits and delights will probably remain a mystery to me.