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Article #623736Re: The birth of BASIC
From: J. Clarke
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 03:07
Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 03:07
32 lines
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2990 bytes
On Sun, 03 Jun 2018 20:50:59 -0600, Joe Pfeiffer <pfei...@cs.nmsu.edu> wrote: >J. Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> writes: > >> On Fri, 1 Jun 2018 11:06:54 -0700 (PDT), hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com wrote: >> >>>On Thursday, May 31, 2018 at 7:25:24 PM UTC-4, J. Clarke wrote: >>> >>>> It was available on the mainframe at UofF in 1973 when I had my first >>>> exposure to computers, but we also had APL, so BASIC kind of >>>> languished. >>> >>>BASIC timesharing was an excellent language, especially as HP and >>>others expanded it in the 1970s, but it was still looked down >>>upon by serious programmers. "Real programmers" were supposed >>>to use Fortran or assembler in that era. APL was credible, too. >> >> At the time APL was like BASIC on steroids. Easy to learn, >> interactive, immensely capable, but could take the rest of your life >> to completely master. > >Also, could take you the rest of your life to figure out the code you >wrote last week... It's not really that bad. I get paid these days to figure out APL code that somebody else wrote 20 years ago, and it's actually not as hard as it's made out to be. Admittely, sometimes I have to go a symbol at a time and rewrite whatever it does in Python then run the Python to make sure that my understanding is correct . . .
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X-Received: by 2002:a24:42cf:: with SMTP id i198-v6mr4645092itb.9.1528081644757; Sun, 03 Jun 2018 20:07:24 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: alt.folklore.computers@googlegroups.com Received: by 2002:a24:2cc4:: with SMTP id i187-v6ls1767376iti.8.canary-gmail; Sun, 03 Jun 2018 20:07:23 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 2002:a24:7d91:: with SMTP id b139-v6mr9167480itc.6.1528081643945; Sun, 03 Jun 2018 20:07:23 -0700 (PDT) Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!f20-v6ni3414itd.0!nntp.google.com!border1.nntp.dca1.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin2!goblin.stu.neva.ru!newsfeed.xs4all.nl!newsfeed9.news.xs4all.nl!85.12.16.69.MISMATCH!peer02.ams1!peer.ams1.xlned.com!news.xlned.com!peer02.am4!peer.am4.highwinds-media.com!peer01.iad!feed-me.highwinds-media.com!news.highwinds-media.com!post01.iad!fx36.iad.POSTED!not-for-mail From: J. Clarke <jclarke...@gmail.com> Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: The birth of BASIC Message-ID: <f4b9hdlupm1bbqnlcsqvla36pu1go72e1q@4ax.com> References: <874lisvjda.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <fnammmFl3d5U4@mid.individual.net> <pep9gi$ssu$1@dont-email.me> <877enj7cme.fsf@usenet.ankman.de> <2111hdh5qbjo4o6ot3n9cuqfgk1pqdn8ck@4ax.com> <86ad7a17-fbd3-4056-98aa-91e1b38932ce@googlegroups.com> <u314hdhnkmb0br74ifiqbtff7m4vls2lub@4ax.com> <1bk1rfclik.fsf@pfeifferfamily.net> User-Agent: ForteAgent/8.00.32.1272 MIME-Version: 1.0 Lines: 32 X-Complaints-To: ab...@newsdemon.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2018 03:07:23 UTC Organization: http://www.NewsDemon.com Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2018 23:07:23 -0400 X-Received-Bytes: 2319 X-Received-Body-CRC: 3067861601 Bytes: 2574 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit