[ale] [ALE] Happy Birthday BASIC

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

My "favorite" story about memory utilization was when we had just announced
the DEC Alpha with its 64-bit address space and someone (who should have
known better) sneered that they would look forward to 128 bit addresses.

I asked them "What problem do you need that much address space to solve?
What is the practical need?"

The look on their face was priceless.

On Fri, May 17, 2024, 05:30 Scott McBrien via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> Jim, you’d choose FORTRAN over C for something that needs speed?
>
> Though really, we have an embarrassment of computing riches these days
> compared with the past, and our programming languages and habits show it.
> (I’m looking at you Java) :
> Sure just keep all that in memory, it’s cool.
>
> No, no, don’t worry about freeing memory back to the system, we’ll “trash
> collect” it at some point in the future.
>
> Typing?  Nah, we don’t need to worry about allocating memory for data
> structures based on their type so we make more economical decisions for
> memory, that’s rubbish!  We’ll just allocate an entire page anytime you
> need anything, and behind the scenes we’ll just keep allocating as you
> need, slapping it all together with the MMU on your behalf!
>
> Recently someone was expressing excitement for 64k page size kernels and I
> asked, “Does your application store enough to need 64k pages?”  They looked
> confused and asked what I meant.  After some level setting of how Linux
> allocated memory, they said they didn’t know because they’d never had to
> think about it, just assumed more == better.  After looking at their
> application memory use, guess what?  It wasn’t going to help them…
>
> -Scott
>
> On May 16, 2024, at 9:36 PM, Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
> 
> Compiled code. Still do FORTRAN when it has to be fast. Still do C if I
> need to burn up a monitor (oops!). But you can't learn it if you can't see
> it, touch it, and change it. The scripting languages are easier to learn
> and definitely have a place. And they are now the gateway to programming.
> They're not perfect and they slurp down hardware. I can't imagine python
> trying to run in the days of BASIC on an early  pc jr.  :-)
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2024, 8:33 PM jon.maddog.hall--- via Ale <ale at ale.org>
> wrote:
>
>> Chuck,
>>
>> Many people did not recognize the benefit of pulling down the source code
>> and typing it in by hand.
>>
>> "Wow!  What does that error mean?   I typed it in just like....oh...I
>> made a mistake!"
>>
>> You had a syntax error, and BASIC showed it right away (most of the time
>> anyway).
>>
>> But maybe your syntax was correct and your program still did not work.
>> Maybe the error was that you meant to type "2" and you typed "3' by
>> mistake....a "run-time error".
>>
>> You do not get to create or fix these problems if all you do is pull
>> binaries off the web or load them from a CDROM.
>>
>> This was EXACTLY why the professors at Cambridge University started the
>> Raspberry Pi project.   They realized that the freshmen of today often knew
>> less about computers than the freshmen of 20 years ago...the ones who 20
>> years ago downloaded source code and (in some cases) even had to COMPILE it
>> and LINK it in order to run it.
>>
>> Happy Birthday, BASIC!
>>
>> md
>>
>>
>> On 05/08/2024 8:10 AM EDT Chuck Payne via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>>
>>
>> I am surprised that this one didn't get an email. Happy Birthday BASIC,
>> it turned 60. It only three years older than me, and has more functions
>> than me too.
>>
>>
>> https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60-dartmouth-basic-started-it-all-in-1964
>>
>> As a kid, I got into BASIC because it was the way to get games. I forgot
>> the name of the magazine, but I would buy it every month and sit at my VIC
>> 20, trying the code in, playing such games and Oil, where you drill to get
>> oil hoping to hit a pocket with a devil in it. Or trying to understand what
>> the data fields were doing.
>>
>> Since I missed the 4th as well, here some BASIC Code for you guys
>>
>> https://www.goto10retro.com/p/star-wars-theme-in-basic
>>
>> Yes, I was one of those kids that would type some weird messages on the
>> computers tha would repeat, like
>>
>> 10 print "Long live ALE, bring more beer"
>> 20 goto 10
>>
>> Happy Computing guys
>>
>> --
>> Terror PUP a.k.a
>> Chuck "PUP" Payne
>> -----------------------------------------
>> Discover it! Enjoy it! Share it! openSUSE Linux.
>> -----------------------------------------
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