On Sun, 15 Jul 2012, Iian Neill wrote: > Hi Ivan,
Uhum, it is Tomasz here, not Ivan :-). > I don't mean to imply that the Eighties was necessarily a Golden Age of > home-brewed programming, or that it even instilled the best programming > practises -- i.e., BASIC -- but I think an argument can be made that > programming literacy -- even bad literacy -- was much more general at > that time. I'm not saying the literacy was higher or better -- clearly > modern languages and paradigms are more powerful and expressive than > BASIC and 6502 machine code -- but it's telling to see how much computer > code was actually published for general consumption in IT magazines and > in children's books. Even though many programs were probably printed > because it was cheaper than distributing cassettes and disks, there were > still plenty of explicative articles on programming practises, tips, > tricks, etc. It very well might have been a Golden Age of homebrew programming. At the time it would be hard to find a computer owner who did not know amount of RAM or clock speed at his disposal. Not so nowadays. At that time, exposition to guts of computing was much broader with everybody - imagine this, there were tv and radio auditions about computers and they were transmitting programs in audio - one had to record them on casette and later load into computer. Cool, wasn't it? And in newspaper kiosks, there were computer magazines, so even if you only bought cigarettes, you would have still noticed there was something new and maybe got interested. Also, in a computer magazines, it was normal thing to learn about different programing languages. This was how I first read about Prolog and Logo. There wasn't much more than introductory materials, yet it was more there is nowadays in places like "PC World". Not to forget I learned Basic, Pascal and C from one such magazine monthly for techno-oriented youth. At least this was how things were going on in mid-80-ties Poland. Of course, now we have internet. So with stackoverflow, sourceforge and github, amount of code to see is few orders of magnitude bigger. But overall exposition to guts of computing is now limited to those who are really interested. Same with tricks and tips - only those find them who want to look for them. Whoever is content with his programming, does not look for improvement nor is exposed to it by accident. Internet induced fragmentation. > Perhaps this only had to do with software pricing and distribution > channels for a given audience -- say, kids, teens, etc. -- but the net > result must surely have been some interest and enthusiasm for being a > software creator rather than just a consumer. I have a friend who is not > in IT, who hasn't touched an 8-bit computer in 20 years, who still > remembers fondly the UK-published Usborne series of kids books on BASIC > programming -- and remembers in detail. These books and this culture made > an impact on him on some level. But I understand the friend does not program much today? > Although there are plenty of blogs and forums on programming out there, > it's really sad that there isn't some mass medium for programming > literacy -- and I suspect that a big part of it is that, despite its > many documented flaws, BASIC at least had a small and graspable > vocabulary that didn't require any header files, libraries, drivers, > compilers, IDEs, or profiling tools. I think the real reason Basic was so ubiquitous, was that umpteen years earlier its interpreter could fit into 4Kb memory of first Altairs. After that, it was merely "let's do like our fathers did", nothing rational like counting keywords or anything. I think other languages used in home niche (Pascal, C) had comparable number of keywords or less (Forth?, Smalltalk?). > There is an enormous amount of software bureaucracy a budding > programmer has to churn through these days before a 'Hello World' > application -- and much more aggravation before producing usable and fun > software. Not really. Install Python, run interpreter and in black window type: print "Hello world"<Enter> and you are done. Or, install Racket, run it and in the interpreter subwindow type (display "Hello world")<Enter> and you are done again. Even better, Racket comes with full IDE, so you don't need to bother much with additional setups. Either write some snippet into interpreter subwindow or longer piece into editor subwindow and when you finish, click running man icon to run it. It's that easy. Of course, both languages require some reading/learning to be done before one can program something more complicated. And in both cases, docs are easily available and (IMHO) well written. > With all of these impediments, it's little wonder so many computer users > -- and perhaps even programmers -- are consumers of the software and > libraries of other people. If you don't have a real pressing need to > 'roll your own' how can you possibly experience the incentive to design > a better wheel -- or a magnetic levitation railway? ;-) My hypothesis is that most people neither care about wheels nor about maglevs enough to try their luck. If they really cared, the impediments you cite are mostly a no problem. Because there is no need to use them to get started. Regards Tomasz Rola -- ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature. ** ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home ** ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened... ** ** ** ** Tomasz Rola mailto:[email protected] ** _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
