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Re:The Eve programming language project is winding down by beagle3 on Thursday January 25, 2018 @07:22AM (#16230342)
I appreciate this response... As you say, it's not too bad, although the {1..10} and the semicolon would be more confusing to the uninitiated (based on the fact that they are confusing to many bash veterans as well...)

Now, how do you replicate

    SAVE "myprogram"
and a later

    LOAD "myprogram"
    RUN
without having to teach vi, redirection, chmod, source, $PATH, and friends?

My point is that the old environments, while limited, scaled from zero to useful with much less requirements than today's environments, which scale much higher at the expense of a beginner's joy of experimentation.

Re:The Eve programming language project is winding down by phaemon on Thursday January 25, 2018 @11:47AM (#16232223)
I do get what you mean; my 48k Spectrum was certainly a simpler machine than my current laptop!

But I still think there are simple things that beginners can do. The whole SAVE, LOAD, RUN concepts also had to be learned. And you only need to know some text editor to be able to save a file. It can then be run with `bash myprogram`. And then later you can add the concepts of adding a shebang and making the file executable.

Also, the huge advantage of teaching shell commands is that it is actually, currently useful. I use those commands every day at work, despite having learnt them initially on an old Sun server many moons ago. I can't say the same for Spectrum Basic! :)

Re:The Eve programming language project is winding down by flukus on Sunday January 28, 2018 @10:15PM (#16255089)
You raise a good point, but we could replicate that with a couple of trivial shell scripts too. Throw a curses library (https://bashsimplecurses.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) into the default profile and you've got an environment capable of simple apps and games too.