The ST was a weirdly mixed bag. GEMDOS was semi-crippled in that it lacked GDOS by default, which made printing/desktop publishing stuff fiddlier. The operating system in general was partly really neat (eg the unix-format U:/ drive on MiNT, containing U:/dev etc, or neat but under-used stuff like the line-A interface), and partly grotesque non-re-entrant CPM-like gunk that was the first thing you'd chuck out when writing code.
I completely disagree that "almost all the diversity is gone" today. There's an unbelievable amount of diversity - so much I have real trouble keeping up - but it's all much higher up the stack, which itself is higher to an extent unthinkable in the 80s. CPUs are so much faster that what used to take minutes is now, for all practical purposes, instant. Who cares what CPU you're actually using when for many purposes you can just emulate your preferred weird design anyway? (Never mind that what you think of as your CPU is actually a bunch of little RISCier processors standing on one another's shoulders inside a
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Also, does VBA count as one of the better dialects? Because I've written a lot of VBA, and it bites. The reason it bites (one of many) is that it's fine to knock up fairly simple things, but it's really not cut out for allowing you to define arbitrary data structures and operations on them in a smooth way. I mean, you can do it, but it's really tedious and might well involve weird gotchas, and you then have to spend your time thinking about all these gotchas instead of your actual algorithm. BASICs I've used have all had this tendency towards shit like line numbers and lack of concept of data structure which mean writing programs of any level of complexity is like wading through thick mud. (And that's even before you start dropping spaces and comments and whatnot to save your precious RAM...)
Personally I think VB and VBA are as much BASICs as Mac OS X is MacOS, or indeed as related as a Macintel is to the original Macintosh. And I'm typing on one. :-)
Y'know, on consideration, I'm not sure line numbers are such a bad thing. It's a very simple conceptual model: type a command, the computer does it. Give it a number, it's saved for later.
The only other model that I can think of that approaches it in simplicity is the one that was used by some early Forth interpreters and (I *think*) Logo: type a command, it does it; give the command to start a new named procedure, and the computer starts /remembering/ commands until you give the end-block command.
Compared to trying to teach little kids about files, filenames, loading, saving, editing, resaving, copying, etc., it would seem /vastly/ simpler and thus preferable to me.
But then, I don't have a little kid. You do. Thoughts? Are you trying to teach Leon to code yet?
My personal experience was that line numbers are an ok sort of crutch to get you used to the idea of giving instructions to a machine, but that they utterly stunt progress from then onwards. They really get in the way of the sort of abstraction that's important for being any cop at programming.
I'm not trying to teach Leon to code, nor am I keen to do so - I'd much rather that coding was something he discovered for himself rather than something he got pushed into. Concerning the faff with filenames and whatnot, I dunno - you would be amazed at how quickly kids just hoover up stuff like this, even if they don't understand it in an adult sense until much later, if ever. Leon wasn't much past his third birthday when he was able to wander over to my laptop, press F4 ("the button with squares"), click "Minecraft", and jump through all the little clicky-button hoops to get a game connected to our local server. I rather doubt he knows what "Direct Connect" actually means, just that he clicks on it at some point to move to the next screen. I
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Musically, I always tend to think of the '80s as being my era -- that's when my teens were and so my early faves were. I underrate '90s music -- it was a great period with many fine bands. Unlike, say, the 201x and for the most part the 200x periods...
All the Win95 tunes were great -- Weezer, "Just like Buddy Holly", Edie Brickell, even "Start it up". :¬D
IKWYM, though I was listening to radio in the 70s and I don't remember a huge amount of 70s music - they played a lot of earlier (50s/60s) stuff, as I recall. Maybe pop really was crap in the 70s.
And when you think how many companies are still running W95 in one form or another, 20 years later, I guess the software must have had something going for it too. :-D
I didn't like '70s music much. I was a bit too young (& my family returned from Nigeria a bit too late) to get into punk until my Uni years, and not really much then.
'60s stuff -- glam rock etc. -- leaves me cold.
I like the definition of cultural decades that don't start until a few years in, e.g.
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I completely disagree that "almost all the diversity is gone" today. There's an unbelievable amount of diversity - so much I have real trouble keeping up - but it's all much higher up the stack, which itself is higher to an extent unthinkable in the 80s. CPUs are so much faster that what used to take minutes is now, for all practical purposes, instant. Who cares what CPU you're actually using when for many purposes you can just emulate your preferred weird design anyway? (Never mind that what you think of as your CPU is actually a bunch of little RISCier processors standing on one another's shoulders inside a ( ... )
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Personally I think VB and VBA are as much BASICs as Mac OS X is MacOS, or indeed as related as a Macintel is to the original Macintosh. And I'm typing on one. :-)
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The only other model that I can think of that approaches it in simplicity is the one that was used by some early Forth interpreters and (I *think*) Logo: type a command, it does it; give the command to start a new named procedure, and the computer starts /remembering/ commands until you give the end-block command.
Compared to trying to teach little kids about files, filenames, loading, saving, editing, resaving, copying, etc., it would seem /vastly/ simpler and thus preferable to me.
But then, I don't have a little kid. You do. Thoughts? Are you trying to teach Leon to code yet?
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I'm not trying to teach Leon to code, nor am I keen to do so - I'd much rather that coding was something he discovered for himself rather than something he got pushed into. Concerning the faff with filenames and whatnot, I dunno - you would be amazed at how quickly kids just hoover up stuff like this, even if they don't understand it in an adult sense until much later, if ever. Leon wasn't much past his third birthday when he was able to wander over to my laptop, press F4 ("the button with squares"), click "Minecraft", and jump through all the little clicky-button hoops to get a game connected to our local server. I rather doubt he knows what "Direct Connect" actually means, just that he clicks on it at some point to move to the next screen. I ( ... )
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc
(From the album Picture Perfect, by Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians. I have a copy of it somewhere.)
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Musically, I always tend to think of the '80s as being my era -- that's when my teens were and so my early faves were. I underrate '90s music -- it was a great period with many fine bands. Unlike, say, the 201x and for the most part the 200x periods...
All the Win95 tunes were great -- Weezer, "Just like Buddy Holly", Edie Brickell, even "Start it up". :¬D
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And when you think how many companies are still running W95 in one form or another, 20 years later, I guess the software must have had something going for it too. :-D
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'60s stuff -- glam rock etc. -- leaves me cold.
I like the definition of cultural decades that don't start until a few years in, e.g.
http://www.city-data.com/forum/history/1860122-how-long-would-you-say-each.html
or
https://www.reddit.com/r/popculture/comments/2lmwj7/in_your_opinion_when_did_the_cultural_decades_of/
If so, yes, 1980s was my time, but I liked much of the 1990s music... and the noughties and since have been notably poor. But then, I'm old now.
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