[ale] [ALE] Happy Birthday BASIC

[Jim Kinney]

The backend compile process is horrifyingly slow. But when the eventually
approved and compiled code will be run every hour or so for the next 3-5
years, and that code requires MPI interconnection to 100-800 other nodes to
run on every hour, devel/compile time starts looking to be less of a
problem.

Pretty sure the heat generated to predict the weather has small but
non-zero impact on the weather :-)

On Fri, May 17, 2024, 6:04 AM Jon "maddog" Hall <jon.maddog.hall at gmail.com>
wrote:

> It all depends on the implementation, but some interpretive languages are
> fairly fast at execution.  The interpreter takes the source down to atoms
> (or "beans" if you go that way) and then feeds them to a very optimized
> run-time system.
>
> Interpretive vs compiled also needs to be looked at the ratio of run time
> vs development.  In a learning situation you may only run a program once
> for every time you compile it.  An interpretive language is much "faster"
> (and less of a resource hog) than running an edit/compile/link/execute
> cycle.
>
> md
>
> On Thu, May 16, 2024, 21:36 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
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