Re:Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC
by npsimons on Tuesday September 02, 2014 @10:54AM
(#8257901)
Plus a lot of his complaints seem to be about the modularisation of modern languages - which seem an odd complaint to make in my opinion. If anything, I'd personally argue that things like importable, self-contained, chunks of code is one of the single greatest advances.
Yeah, his respect for BASIC seems misplaced at best. Take this excerpt:
There's a small detail that I skipped over: entering a multi-line program on a computer in a department store. Without starting an external editor. Without creating a file to be later loaded into the BASIC interpreter
So what? Any language with a REPL (and nowadays, that's pretty much all of them) can do that. And sure, computers don't boot up into a REPL, but a) do you really want them to? and b) as the top comment here shows, you can easily set up a computer to boot straight to a REPL.
Yeah, his respect for BASIC seems misplaced at best. Take this excerpt:
There's a small detail that I skipped over: entering a multi-line program on a computer in a department store. Without starting an external editor. Without creating a file to be later loaded into the BASIC interpreter
So what? Any language with a REPL (and nowadays, that's pretty much all of them) can do that. And sure, computers don't boot up into a REPL, but a) do you really want them to? and b) as the top comment here shows, you can easily set up a computer to boot straight to a REPL.