Atari-inspired, new "8-bit" computer

[reifsnyderb]

49 minutes ago, Stephen said:

They never innovated.  Just took other ideas and slickly packaged them and over-priced them.  Even going back to Jobs stealing parts, time, and info while working at Atari, to everything that followed.  Hell - Jobs even screwed Wozniak on the Breakout deal (1975), so he's always been a huckster.

Sounds like Bill Gates, too.   lol

[+Stephen]

29 minutes ago, reifsnyderb said:

Sounds like Bill Gates, too.   lol

There are certain stories I will never not stand up too.  They are - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Bob Ross (he fucked over his teacher and mentor Bill Alexander in an unforgivable way).  Maybe I am petty, but I feel I must do this.

[reifsnyderb]

2 minutes ago, Stephen said:

There are certain stories I will never not stand up too.  They are - Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Bob Ross (he fucked over his teacher and mentor Bill Alexander in an unforgivable way).  Maybe I am petty, but I feel I must do this.

Bob Ross?  Is that the painter guy?

[+Stephen]

11 hours ago, reifsnyderb said:

Bob Ross?  Is that the painter guy?

Yeah.  Bill Alexander was his mentor.  He stole everything from him.  His technique, his paints (then created his own line), everything.  I guess Bob just considered it a "happy little accident".

[zzip]

15 hours ago, lightman said:

But I think this is a little like complaining that a bicycle can't compete with a car. BASIC was meant to be simple. However, I think if you look at something like QuickBasic, it had those features (or many of them). I tried Amos on Amiga and thought it worked well as a next step. After that, I went on to C.

BASIC has many dialects,  and there may be some that don't have the shortcomings I'm talking about.    I'm mostly talking about the 8-bit implementations.   They had to be compact,  so extra features were not included.   Those systems didn't have modern editors, so line numbers were used.   It was great for learning when that's all you had, but nowadays they fall short.   That was even recognized back in the 80s,  my intro to programming courses taught Pascal because even then it was considered more modern than Basic and still easy to learn.

 

15 hours ago, lightman said:

It comes down to personal experience, I suppose. Everyone learns in their own way and some people don't develop the same bad habits.

The old BASICs forced bad habits though.   Like every variable is global and there's no concept of data structures.   It's very easy to get used to programming this way and take it with you to other languages.   Problem is as your program grows, you end up with a whole bunch of variables with weird names (to keep them unique) that become very hard  to keep track of.   I found if you create logical data structures and use local variables (global only when necessary), then you can have names that always make sense, and it was easier code and figure out what the code was doing after coming back to it after some time.    It took me awhile to adjust to that though because I was so used to doing things the BASIC way.

 

17 hours ago, mickster said:

Tramiel thought he could make another c64 (cheap computer for everyone) .  That worked the first time around, but the consumers had grown up to computers for the 2nd generation.

Main reason was ST wasn't as cheap as the C64.     Even though it was much less expensive than the competition, it was still a bit of an investment,  so I think a lot fewer parents were willing to just buy one for their kids at Christmas they way they did with C64s

 

 

[zzip]

12 hours ago, Stephen said:

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Bob Ross

Now there's a combo you don't see everyday!  

 

But a lot of "media figures" are nothing like the pleasant people who appear on camera.   Look at Ellen, for example.     Heck, I've even heard bad stories about Mother Teresa. 

[Ppyo]

22 hours ago, lightman said:

Linux can be adapted but it's still too complex for what I am looking for. Modern scripting languages are also too complex and have too many requirements. I think BASIC has been unfairly shunted when it's still a good learning tool.

 

If I could get Linux down to booting in no more than two seconds, there might be a chance. The OS would have to be read-only (like squashfs) and ideally be on some internal flash.

 

 

You could try Picobricks:

https://picobricks.com/how-to-use-picobricks/

Raspberry Pico (boots in a second) with integrated hardware for DIY projects (with kids in mind). It's fun!

[adam242]

deleted

Edited August 23, 2023 by adam242
probably too political

[Geister]

On 8/21/2023 at 4:58 PM, zzip said:

Python is the other big one nowadays,  but there's Perl, Groovy, PHP, Bash, Ruby, Powershell, 

 

Getting rid of line numbers is a good start, but what else does it add?

 

For instance I had GFA BASIC on the ST back then, and there was a lot of hype at the time about BASICs with no line numbers.    But it still fell short in other areas-  it didn't have good datatype support,  procedure implementation was minimal (but it at least had local variable support),  it discouraged whitespace by still requiring REM on "blank" lines.   When I go back and try to read my old GFA code, it's much harder to read than it should be because of the way the editor forces thing to be written.

Have you looked at Fast Basic?  It's missing a few things from modern basics, but we are dealing with a 6502 here.  I don't think you're going to get VB.NET on the Atari, but Fast Basic's a step in the right direction.  VB.NET doesn't get much respect from programmers today, I had to switch to C# to get any respect from the anti-VB snobs, but I felt they were interchangeable...the languages, not the snobs.

[Matej]

Olimex Neo6502 is 2023 6502 computer (30euro/usd). 

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open-source-hardware

 

[spicyjack]

57 minutes ago, Matej said:

Olimex Neo6502 is 2023 6502 computer (30euro/usd). 

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/Neo6502/open-source-hardware

The "firmware" for the Neo6502, aka "the code for the Raspberry Pi RP2040 chip which will drive video/audio for this system", is still "in progress".  That being said, they do have Apple II (not II+ or IIe) emulation running now.

 

When it is done, the system will basically be a 65C02 + RP2040 version of the Agon Light, which is Z80 with an ESP32 as the video/audio driver.

 

There's also the Olimex ESP32 FabGL SBC board (https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/ESP32-SBC-FabGL/open-source-hardware), which is just the ESP32 without the hardware Z80/65C02.  You could write an emulated version of whatever CPU you want to learn on in software and then flash it to the ESP32.  Or just write something in C and then flash that to the board.  The ESP32 FabGL SBC is the cheapest board that I know if that will let you connect to a modern display device, it has VGA output which can then be converted to HDMI using an adapter.

 

All of the current Olimex "retro computers" are here:

 

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/

Edited August 24, 2023 by spicyjack
Rewording, added Apple II notes

[Gromit337]

On 8/22/2023 at 4:07 PM, zzip said:

BASIC has many dialects,  and there may be some that don't have the shortcomings I'm talking about.    I'm mostly talking about the 8-bit implementations.   They had to be compact,  so extra features were not included.   Those systems didn't have modern editors, so line numbers were used.   It was great for learning when that's all you had, but nowadays they fall short.   That was even recognized back in the 80s,  my intro to programming courses taught Pascal because even then it was considered more modern than Basic and still easy to learn.

 

The old BASICs forced bad habits though.   Like every variable is global and there's no concept of data structures.   It's very easy to get used to programming this way and take it with you to other languages.   Problem is as your program grows, you end up with a whole bunch of variables with weird names (to keep them unique) that become very hard  to keep track of.   I found if you create logical data structures and use local variables (global only when necessary), then you can have names that always make sense, and it was easier code and figure out what the code was doing after coming back to it after some time.    It took me awhile to adjust to that though because I was so used to doing things the BASIC way.

 

Main reason was ST wasn't as cheap as the C64.     Even though it was much less expensive than the competition, it was still a bit of an investment,  so I think a lot fewer parents were willing to just buy one for their kids at Christmas they way they did with 

Would you teach a young child to read and write using well known literary classics or other tomes aimed specifically at adults? Would you introduce numbers and maths to such children using trigonometry and calculus?

 

BASIC is a tool designed to teach very simple ideas in an easily understood way. The first letter of the acronym gives us the clue. It introduces ideas such as variables, strings, arrays of numbers, logic, of breaking problems down to individual steps and experimenting. Without the "clutter" of importing obscure libraries, trying to understand objects, classes, inheritance or even the scope of variables. All that comes later, once you've learned rudimentary concepts. Learning it won't allow a newcomer to produce the next great 'classic', but like the books the children start off with, it gives a simple foundation on which to build.

 

Too many adults assume that everything a child learns is going to directly bear upon their future careers, but that is blatantly not true. Most people who dabble in programming do not become professional programmers. I studied lots of things at school, and throughout my life, that have no direct bearing on my everyday life. They were just brief introductions to subjects that may or may not be of use... but they gave us knowledge and ideas on which we could base our choices. We probably all started with simple, illustrated kid's books, but most can now read even the most intricate and complicated of tomes. Why should programming be any different?

[zzip]

31 minutes ago, Gromit337 said:

Would you teach a young child to read and write using well known literary classics or other tomes aimed specifically at adults? Would you introduce numbers and maths to such children using trigonometry and calculus?

Would you give a child a stone tablet and chisel to teach them how to read and write?

 

32 minutes ago, Gromit337 said:

BASIC is a tool designed to teach very simple ideas in an easily understood way.

Sure it was designed that way in the 1960s when computers were lacking in memory, storage and couldn't even handle proper editors leading to the line-number scheme.

 

34 minutes ago, Gromit337 said:

The first letter of the acronym gives us the clue. It introduces ideas such as variables, strings, arrays of numbers, logic, of breaking problems down to individual steps and experimenting. Without the "clutter" of importing obscure libraries, trying to understand objects, classes, inheritance or even the scope of variables. All that comes later, once you've learned rudimentary concepts.

There are plenty of languages that teach the same thing in a structured way without teaching you the bad habits BASIC teaches you.   Nobody forces you to use a languages advanced features in your first projects,  but at least they are there for when you need them and don't have to figure out how to do it with BASIC's limited datatypes and global scope making projects more complicated to develop and maintain.  (and cause you to pick up bad coding habits in the process)

 

This discussion sounds like "well I learned BASIC so my kid should learn BASIC".   With no better reason than that.   Lots of kids learned LOGO back in the 80s,  who learns LOGO today?

 

The language is a means to an end.  I learned BASIC back in 80s not because it was a good language,  but because it's what my new computer came with.  There were plenty of professional programmers warning that BASIC wasn't good even back in the 80s!  

 

Today's kids might want to get into coding to mod games or do a Unity project or whatever.   They'd need to learn whichever language is required to accomplish their goal.   Saying "No!  You must learn BASIC first, on this ancient micro!" is more likely to turn them off to coding than get them excited about it.

[reifsnyderb]

 

 

52 minutes ago, zzip said:

Today's kids might want to get into coding to mod games or do a Unity project or whatever.

Comparing Unity as a way to learn to code would be like learning how to work on an engine by fixing a 2023 Chevy as opposed to a 1980's Cub Cadet.  Unity's interface, alone, can be overwhelming.

 

One problem I've seen is that code examples may have a bunch of code and you are to understand that with little explanation.  Only a line or two is really the example.  It's like showing somebody how to write the "Hello World" program, in C, without any explanation of stdio.h.

 

The advantage of BASIC, on an early 8-bit, was that you turned the computer on and started to write what you wanted.  You didn't have to figure out what library file you needed or have a complicated user interface to ponder over.  You didn't have to worry about the proper command to compile the code, you didn't have to worry about a linker, and you certainly didn't have to worry about some dependency breaking something somewhere.  It just worked.

 

Unfortunately, I have also noticed a lack of interest in computer programming among kids as well.

 

The problem, to me, is that computer programming no longer has an easy way to get started.  With BASIC, there was an easy way to get started and you could grow into programming.  You can no longer grow into it.  Instead, you get hit by this huge "thing" that you have to learn everything about in order to do anything useful.  (No, I don't count "Scratch".  Let's not mention that.)  Web development is another absolute disaster.  It evolved from HTML and now requires that you understand multiple languages and "markup" languages in order to build a decent website.  Then, we have a huge number of computer programming languages....so where do you start anyhow?

 

When you show a kid how to write a simple BASIC program, they may be interested.  Then, they ask:  How do you write a game?  They aren't talking about something simple like the "lemonade stand" game, either.  They want a flight simulator, or something like minecraft, or....well, you get the idea.  So, you whip out GoDot, show them the example code, and the poor kid falls apart.  Without a decent programming background, it is overwhelming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[zzip]

10 minutes ago, reifsnyderb said:

Comparing Unity as a way to learn to code would be like learning how to work on an engine by fixing a 2023 Chevy as opposed to a 1980's Cub Cadet.  Unity's interface, alone, can be overwhelming.

 Perhaps,  I know people who have gone straight into Unity as a way of creating games and skipped the more traditional way of learning a programming language first.   Part of the issue today is games (and other projects) are so complex that writing things from scratch is no longer feasible, and a division of labor has formed...  Want to write a game from scratch?   You could easily spend all your time creating a cool game engine, but never get around to implementing your game idea in it, or you could pick up a pre-existing game engine and focus only on your game logic, and let the engine take care of everything else. 

 

I've never used Unity myself, but it seems like a popular choice for the beginners.

 

18 minutes ago, reifsnyderb said:

One problem I've seen is that code examples may have a bunch of code and you are to understand that with little explanation.  Only a line or two is really the example.  It's like showing somebody how to write the "Hello World" program, in C, without any explanation of stdio.h.

I agree, I hate when I look for examples of how to do a simple thing, and the examples dump a large block of code on you that isn't really explained.     Although stdio.h in C is just one line, and a C "Hello World" program is still short.   However C was never really considered a beginners language.   Pascal was the teaching language of choice in the 80s and 90s and had a structure similar to C, except with more training wheels and no libraries to import.

 

58 minutes ago, reifsnyderb said:

The advantage of BASIC, on an early 8-bit, was that you turned the computer on and started to write what you wanted.  You didn't have to figure out what library file you needed or have a complicated user interface to ponder over.  You didn't have to worry about the proper command to compile the code, you didn't have to worry about a linker, and you certainly didn't have to worry about some dependency breaking something somewhere.  It just worked.

In the 8-bit world, it was the language of choice a lot of those systems didn't come with disk drives, so a compiler would have been out of the question.   Line numbers were there because there was no full-screen text file editors either.    A lot of these systems didn't have a proper user interface either, and BASIC doubled as the user interface.   So it was the right product for those machines..    Although a lot of us did want compilers since interpreted BASIC was slow.

 

By the time the 16-bit computers came around  ST/Amiga/MS-DOS,  BASIC was much less important.  Sure they still came with a copy (usually as a separate application and no longer built into the ROM).   It was not part of the user interface anymore and C/C++ seemed to be the preferred languages for real work.   Advanced BASIC products were still there for those used to it. (Visual BASIC, GFA BASIC)  but they were becoming more like other language..   Line numbers might be gone and full screen editors were used and compilers were more readily available, Object-Oriented features added, and so on.   Sometimes it barely resembles the old 8-bit BASICs

 

But if you want to avoid compiled languages,  there's scripting languages like Python.   Seems like Python is taught in school these days as a beginner language.

 

1 hour ago, reifsnyderb said:

The problem, to me, is that computer programming no longer has an easy way to get started.  With BASIC, there was an easy way to get started and you could grow into programming.  You can no longer grow into it.  Instead, you get hit by this huge "thing" that you have to learn everything about in order to do anything useful.  (No, I don't count "Scratch".  Let's not mention that.)  Web development is another absolute disaster.  It evolved from HTML and now requires that you understand multiple languages and "markup" languages in order to build a decent website.  Then, we have a huge number of computer programming languages....so where do you start anyhow?

Websites are still HTML,  if you want to make them more interactive and pretty, then you will want to add Javascript and CSS.   But there's also numerous tools to help you build websites, that I wonder how much hand-coding is still required.

 

There's a lot of printed tutorials and video tutorials on Youtube that can help you learn almost everything,  I would start there.

 

1 hour ago, reifsnyderb said:

When you show a kid how to write a simple BASIC program, they may be interested.  Then, they ask:  How do you write a game?  They aren't talking about something simple like the "lemonade stand" game, either.  They want a flight simulator, or something like minecraft, or....well, you get the idea.  So, you whip out GoDot, show them the example code, and the poor kid falls apart.  Without a decent programming background, it is overwhelming.

In the 80s, the typical kid's BASIC ability was:

10 PRINT "MY NAME"

20 GOTO 10

RUN

 

It wasn't obvious how to turn that knowledge into a game either.  A few of us persevered and figured that out, most didn't.   

 

But now the tools are different, things are more complex.   Most people won't write a 3D game like Minecraft from scratch and will start with a 3D engine and force themselves to learn how to code for it.   

[Thelen]

Just a little thought about a 'new' 8 bit computer..

 

If Altirra works as bare metal on raspberry pi, then it would be really cheap (FPGA based is super but expansive like the Mist) to have a 'new' 8 bit computer, has already lot's of games and software.

And if you want this 'new' computer to support better graphics/sound/more ram- or faster 16 bit cpu: Altirra has it! (in the way of the VBXE, Rapidus or 65816, Ultimate 1 MB).

[Matej]

There is also Pico56(rpi pico) and HBC56(real IC chips):

https://github.com/visrealm/pico-56

https://github.com/visrealm/hbc-56

 

Specs:

• 65C02 CPU
• 65C22 VIA
• TMS9918A VDP (Sega SMS/MSX1)
• Dual AY-3-8910 PSGs (comp Atari ST)
• Dual NES controller inputs
• PS/2 keyboard input
• 96KB Banked RAM/ROM
• BASIC

Pico56 is very cheap!

 

Pcb-Way:

https://www.pcbway.com/project/shareproject/PICO_56_Retro_Computer_on_a_Pi_Pico_515c59b8.html

 

There are paint/sprite editors for msx1 also arkostracker2 for ay music...

 

Can imagine have new Atari Games like Laura, Crownland etc...

 

Or we can be inspired mod firmware:

- atari xe/xl graphics

- 2x pokey

 

 

 

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by Matej

[Mark2008]

Just responding in general to the discussion on how to teach kids programming, which is interesting.  When I first started helping my son with programming we started on Lua/LOVE, because Lua was of interest due to its use as a scripting language in games like ComputerCraft (Minecraft).   My other two children have had no interest in programming and simply didn't learn any.

 

But anyway my youngest did a couple programs in Lua/LOVE, but later his interests were more with AI, and not simply because my job is in the field, but because AI is very fascinating to kids and they see the use for it in a myriad of projects.  So, Lua was out, python is in.  Because if you are interfacing with an LLM, and you will get pretty far, pretty fast leveraging libraries like, pydantic, langchain, streamlit - depending upon the project of course.  

 

and python is far easier to read and if comparing modern computer running python to 8-bit computer running basic, python is far easier to learn.

 

old school basic is not readable, and full of oddities.

 

But the most important factor, that in my view separates who will learn and who will not learn, is if the person has a task to complete.

If they have a task to complete, then they sit down and create.   The task is going to, in many cases, dictate the language, not the other way around.

 

 

Edited December 14, 2023 by Mark2008

[zzip]

11 hours ago, Mark2008 said:

But the most important factor, that in my view separates who will learn and who will not learn, is if the person has a task to complete.

Exactly this.   Putting a kid today in front of BASIC would be like how many of us felt in Calculus class..  "what exactly do I need this for?"    It's easier to learn something when you have a use for it.

 

[Lord Thag]

3 hours ago, zzip said:

Exactly this.   Putting a kid today in front of BASIC would be like how many of us felt in Calculus class..  "what exactly do I need this for?"    It's easier to learn something when you have a use for it.

 

BASIC is to programming these days what distributors were to fuel injection in terms of car maintenance. You only need to know how to work on them if you have an old car that has one. It's a pointless skill if working on more modern machines. Python is definitely the best starting point these days, particularly with the Pi architecture favoring that, as do most of the kiddie programing suites. If we're building a fantasy computer, might as well have the built in language be something like Python where those skills can transfer over to real life.

 

Quote

They never innovated.  Just took other ideas and slickly packaged them and over-priced them.  Even going back to Jobs stealing parts, time, and info while working at Atari, to everything that followed.  Hell - Jobs even screwed Wozniak on the Breakout deal (1975), so he's always been a huckster.

Couldn't agree more. There's a great Bill Burr stand up routine about this. He trashes Jobs because Jobs tended to walk out on stage in sneakers and act like he was Tech Jesus when really, all he did was be a toxic, abusive bully to a huge array of far more talented people who designed and built the tech, and never got an ounce of credit.

[Krystone]

In reference to the first message in this thread, I've had a similar idea recently as well. I've even posted on EEVblog Electronics Community Forum (https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects/i-want-to-create-an-inexpensive-risc-v-based-retro-like-computer-video-console/) and even ended up spending money on research, paying an EE for help, and buying Neo6502, as well as AgonLight2 from Olimex (https://www.olimex.com/Products/Retro-Computers/). In the end, I got discouraged, and returned to Atari, where there's a strong community. Now, I am thinking about initializing a project that would take all popular expansions and upgrades and perhaps create a new Atari motherboard but with majority of components implemented in a FPGA, including perhaps 65816. The key would be backward compatibility... I digress, but I thought I'd share this.

[Geister]

59 minutes ago, Lord Thag said:

BASIC is to programming these days what distributors were to fuel injection in terms of car maintenance. You only need to know how to work on them if you have an old car that has one. It's a pointless skill if working on more modern machines. Python is definitely the best starting point these days, particularly with the Pi architecture favoring that, as do most of the kiddie programing suites. If we're building a fantasy computer, might as well have the built in language be something like Python where those skills can transfer over to real life.

 

Couldn't agree more. There's a great Bill Burr stand up routine about this. He trashes Jobs because Jobs tended to walk out on stage in sneakers and act like he was Tech Jesus when really, all he did was be a toxic, abusive bully to a huge array of far more talented people who designed and built the tech, and never got an ounce of credit.

Being an auto mechanic that switched to programming when more and more computers started appearing in cars, this rings true.  But to be pedantic, it's distributors to electronic ignition and carburetors to fuel injection.  

 

As for languages, I learned to program on the Atari and continued with QuickBasic on the PC.  That version of Basic got me paid as I wrote a ton of software for my employer using it.  I moved on to Object Pascal and Visual Basic/.net and C++ and C#.  I always said the language didn't matter.  What mattered was learning how to program and the language was just the tool you used.  I had a professor at college that told me that I couldn't build linked lists in Visual Basic and that C was better because it had pointers...until I showed him how to build a linked list of objects using object pointers in the object definition.  

 

For someone that wrote plant and lab automation software, the real limitation was when you couldn't reach the hardware to do data acquisition because Windows discouraged direct access to the raw metal.  Fortunately, there were assembly level programmers writing device drivers to do that.

 

I'm not sure I'd endorse Python.  That language is a "kitchen-sinker" language with so many half-explained constructs tossed into it that I can envision uber-spaghetti code being written in it that would make old-fashioned basic look clean by comparison.  I volunteered to check a manual for Python that was being written for publication be a college professor and at on point I was so confused by the explanations of the language features that I tossed my hands up said good luck with that, I'm out.

 

I just want to know when I can get my hands on a PBI expansion box and any cards to go with it.

[zzip]

42 minutes ago, Geister said:

As for languages, I learned to program on the Atari and continued with QuickBasic on the PC.  That version of Basic got me paid as I wrote a ton of software for my employer using it.  I moved on to Object Pascal and Visual Basic/.net and C++ and C#.  I always said the language didn't matter.  What mattered was learning how to program and the language was just the tool you used.  I had a professor at college that told me that I couldn't build linked lists in Visual Basic and that C was better because it had pointers...until I showed him how to build a linked list of objects using object pointers in the object definition.

I was great at putting all kinds of data into BASIC variables and arrays.   Linked lists?  Sure I could find a way to do that.  The problem is BASIC isn't good for managing those variables..    Everything is global scoped (maybe some BASICs have local variables, but not the ones I learned on),  you can't build data structures to better organize your data.

 

Once I learned to use structs in C, my code became much more readable and less hacky than what my BASIC programs looked like.

 

42 minutes ago, Geister said:

I'm not sure I'd endorse Python.  That language is a "kitchen-sinker" language with so many half-explained constructs tossed into it that I can envision uber-spaghetti code being written in it that would make old-fashioned basic look clean by comparison.

I have my issues with Python too,  but I'd endorse it for beginners because it's easy to learn and integrates with so much stuff.   I don't like the way that indentation is part of the language--  but it does lead to easier to read code.   BASIC likes to make your code more dense and harder to read.

Edited December 14, 2023 by zzip

[Lord Thag]

1 hour ago, Geister said:

Being an auto mechanic that switched to programming when more and more computers started appearing in cars, this rings true.  But to be pedantic, it's distributors to electronic ignition and carburetors to fuel injection.  

 

As for languages, I learned to program on the Atari and continued with QuickBasic on the PC.  That version of Basic got me paid as I wrote a ton of software for my employer using it.  I moved on to Object Pascal and Visual Basic/.net and C++ and C#.  I always said the language didn't matter.  What mattered was learning how to program and the language was just the tool you used.  I had a professor at college that told me that I couldn't build linked lists in Visual Basic and that C was better because it had pointers...until I showed him how to build a linked list of objects using object pointers in the object definition.  

 

For someone that wrote plant and lab automation software, the real limitation was when you couldn't reach the hardware to do data acquisition because Windows discouraged direct access to the raw metal.  Fortunately, there were assembly level programmers writing device drivers to do that.

 

I'm not sure I'd endorse Python.  That language is a "kitchen-sinker" language with so many half-explained constructs tossed into it that I can envision uber-spaghetti code being written in it that would make old-fashioned basic look clean by comparison.  I volunteered to check a manual for Python that was being written for publication be a college professor and at on point I was so confused by the explanations of the language features that I tossed my hands up said good luck with that, I'm out.

 

I just want to know when I can get my hands on a PBI expansion box and any cards to go with it.

Ah yes, I did a ton with QuickBasic/Qbasic as well back in the day. Fun times.

 

As to python, I agree with you for professional purposes... but as a learning language it's currently the most widely used across most of the cheap dev systems like the Raspberry Pi. It's not hard to learn, if you're learning it the way most of the kids do via video. It's very similar to Lua in some ways. The documentation does kinda suck though. I wrote a reasonably feature complete roguelike in it awhile back, and found the object oriented data structures pretty handy, and I appreciated the terse syntax as well. It's got it's issues (speed) but it's pretty solid for a new programmer.

 

That said, I agree with you: as long as whatever you learn teaches you how the underlying PC actually works, you can learn any other language pretty easily once you have your first one down.

 

And yes... I want that new 1090 with a bunch cards too!

[Geister]

32 minutes ago, Lord Thag said:

Ah yes, I did a ton with QuickBasic/Qbasic as well back in the day. Fun times.

 

As to python, I agree with you for professional purposes... but as a learning language it's currently the most widely used across most of the cheap dev systems like the Raspberry Pi. It's not hard to learn, if you're learning it the way most of the kids do via video. It's very similar to Lua in some ways. The documentation does kinda suck though. I wrote a reasonably feature complete roguelike in it awhile back, and found the object oriented data structures pretty handy, and I appreciated the terse syntax as well. It's got it's issues (speed) but it's pretty solid for a new programmer.

 

That said, I agree with you: as long as whatever you learn teaches you how the underlying PC actually works, you can learn any other language pretty easily once you have your first one down.

 

And yes... I want that new 1090 with a bunch cards too!

Looking at you Brian!