[ale] [ALE] Happy Birthday BASIC

Mon May 20 11:34:57 EDT 2024

"On the other hand I often taught a ten-week course in FORTRAN to students
who already had BASIC ..."

I couldn't agree more.

I had Pascal class in university. Just knowledge of variables, loops, if
then statements all that from Basic gave me upper hand in this class.

I wrote a lot of Pascal programs for the cute girls in my group:)

On Sun, May 19, 2024, 09:58 jon.maddog.hall--- via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:

> So you seem to have completely ignored my statement about the issue of
> development vs running where I specifically pointed out that in an
> educational environment you compile many more times than you run.
>
> in 1977 I had the task of taking students who had never seen a computer in
> real life, never logged into an account, never used a text editor of any
> type and try to teach them FORTRAN in a eight-week summer-school course of
> three hours of lecture each week.
>
> I asked the administration of the school if anyone had ever taught this
> before in this time frame and was told "Oh yes".
>
> In was a time-sharing system (RSTS/E on a PDP-11/70), so I had to teach
> them what "logging in" was, what a file was, what data was, what a
> text-editor did (and how to use the commands), what compiling did, what
> linking did, how to use an interactive debugger, then programming itself
> and the FORTRAN language itself.
>
> None of the students had access to computers at home, and there were not
> many people who could help them at home.   No online forums for help.
>
> They struggled.  I struggled.  And after eight weeks they were barely
> getting started with very, very simple FORTRAN programs.
>
> On the other hand I often taught a ten-week course in FORTRAN to students
> who already had BASIC as part of a entry-level course called "Introduction
> to Data Processing".  The students of that course thrived due to a much
> greater familiarity to everything other than the
> edit/compile/link/run/debug process (and even editing and debugging were
> easier because the concept of that was already known).
>
> BASIC allowed simple editing just by retyping the line number with the
> statement.   It allowed interactive "debugging" by being able to print out
> the variables using the source code variable name, or setting the variable
> to a different value before telling the interpreter to "continue".   in
> RSTS/E you were talking to the BASIC interpreter as soon as you logged in.
> The BASIC interpreter was much like the shell interpreter in UNIX/Linux
> today.
>
> The student could type in:
>
> Print 5*3
>
> then hit return and the machine would print:
>
> 15
>
> No editor, no compiler, no linker...
>
> To be complete I know of no reason why FORTRAN could not be implemented in
> an interpreted fashion and after a program's source code is fully debugged
> sent through a "real" compiler to get a smaller, perhaps faster object.
> Once the program has been debugged you do not need the interactive debugger
> part of the program in memory.
>
> And of course a more modern, fully functioning IDE could make the
> compile/link/execute/debug path significantly easier these days.  And of
> course students today have used computers in so many ways through their
> phones, etc. that many of the concepts which I took up time in class the
> students already know.
>
> Finally, I will say that when I finished the eight-week summer course in
> FORTRAN to what I felt were disastrous results I went back to the
> administration and questioned again if that course had ever been taught
> successfully before.
>
> The answer was "no".....they had lied before.
>
> /*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 :-)*/
>
> Quite frankly for this type of problem I might look at GPU or FPGA
> accelerators just like years ago we invented floating point accelerators
> instead of doing floating point using integer only CPUs.
>
> Depending on the type of problem, a language like Erlang or Haskell would
> probably help with such a distributed problem
>
> md
>
>
> On 05/17/2024 11:19 AM EDT Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>
>
> 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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