- #1
oldtobor
- 132
- 0
They say that to understand the history of something, you can't be too close to the events. So I am referring to something that happened about 20 years ago, namely when pascal and turbo pascal started to become popular and started to substitute basic as the programming language for home/PC computers. That is the day computers died. Pascal was the next "big thing" and cool and also "harder" so it started to pick up. Basic slowly started to become out of style. But the question I asked then and I still ask today is "why say an old thing in a new way ?" I also guess that is when programmers started running out of ideas. When you run out of new ideas invent a new programming lanuguage.
I started programming microprocessors in summer 1978 using the SCAMP National semiconductors development kit in machine language (aka load accumulator with 0 was C4, 00). Then I learned basic and used it until about 1988. I then went down the road of learning all the sequence of languages: turbo pascal; turbo C; unix systems ksh; awk; perl; javascript; visual basic; java; c++; delphi; php; python.
After all these years I have come to the conclusion that we would have been all better off just sticking to basic and maybe improving it's compiler and creating a possibly huge library of reusable programs and modules. If all those man years used for just "java" would have been used to really program, we would be light years ahead of where we are now.
Do you want an example ? Try to write this simple basic program in Java:
FOR i = 1 TO 5
a$ = ""
WHILE a$ = "": a$ = INKEY$: WEND
PRINT a$
IF a$ = "w" THEN SOUND 150, 2
IF a$ = "z" THEN SOUND 550, 2
NEXT
Hey don't forget we are in the year 2005 and we have all the great Object oriented java crap available!
I started programming microprocessors in summer 1978 using the SCAMP National semiconductors development kit in machine language (aka load accumulator with 0 was C4, 00). Then I learned basic and used it until about 1988. I then went down the road of learning all the sequence of languages: turbo pascal; turbo C; unix systems ksh; awk; perl; javascript; visual basic; java; c++; delphi; php; python.
After all these years I have come to the conclusion that we would have been all better off just sticking to basic and maybe improving it's compiler and creating a possibly huge library of reusable programs and modules. If all those man years used for just "java" would have been used to really program, we would be light years ahead of where we are now.
Do you want an example ? Try to write this simple basic program in Java:
FOR i = 1 TO 5
a$ = ""
WHILE a$ = "": a$ = INKEY$: WEND
PRINT a$
IF a$ = "w" THEN SOUND 150, 2
IF a$ = "z" THEN SOUND 550, 2
NEXT
Hey don't forget we are in the year 2005 and we have all the great Object oriented java crap available!