Re:HARC
by schoen on Thursday May 12, 2016 @12:45PM
(#11684813)
I think I pretty much agree about all of those changes except for "the work necessary to get something to display on a screen". This was much less in BASIC on machines like the Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, Apple ][, and IBM PC that could boot into a BASIC interpreter. Then you could turn on the machine, type
10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD"
RUN
and see something on the screen.
In more recent environments you have a text editor and IDE or shell, which likely introduce more steps (even the concept of saving your code in a file!). I've also seen people worry about how much harder it can be to make a program display graphics compared to the BASIC era (which generally had built-in language primitives to go to graphics mode and start drawing stuff, which may at least require importing a library in contemporary languages and maybe installing a library).
In more recent environments you have a text editor and IDE or shell, which likely introduce more steps (even the concept of saving your code in a file!). I've also seen people worry about how much harder it can be to make a program display graphics compared to the BASIC era (which generally had built-in language primitives to go to graphics mode and start drawing stuff, which may at least require importing a library in contemporary languages and maybe installing a library).