Stephen Usher wrote: > Well, I see that there are two issues with the QL legacy, one > which gives a QL-like experience (i.e. SuperBASIC etc.) and > emulation for running old programs. > > Now, for the former, I can see a niche market just waiting to > be filled. > > Firstly, read this link: > > http://www.osnews.com/story/23464/Why_Johnny_Can_t_Code > > Then, thing back to the BBC programme, Electric Dreams, the > 1980s episode (unfortunately not now available to view): > > http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n59t4 > > The boy was amazed by the BBC micro, as was his friend. They > loved to be able to make the machine do what THEY wanted it > to do quickly and easily. (As opposed to the current crop of > OSs which ALLOW the user to do what the application > developers thought that the user SHOULD do and no more.)
I agree with Stephen if we talk about (complete) novices (like my children of age 10 and 8). I will try to explain my son the basics of a computer program by using SuperBASIC with QemuLator in fullscreen mode on our family notebook. Some FOR/NEXT loops (e.g. FOR i=1 to 7 step 2), some PAPER/INK/PRINT/LINE/CIRCLE calls using some variables, even some RND and BEEPing. But I'm sure that if he gets interested in programming we will move to a recent development environment very soon (in months if not weeks). He will definitely ask me: "How can I program my first iPod app?" Well the Apple Mac OS X/iOS development environment is not known to me further than what my friend Ruben Bakker presented us at the Lucerne show, but I can teach him the Microsoft world telling him: Do you wanna program your first Notebook app? OK, he will say: "No I wanna have an app on my iPod!" Arghh ;-) > So, I envisage the following in this case, a > re-implementation of SuperBASIC, extendable but basically the > same as the original, developed using a cross-platform > graphics toolkit, such as QT (which runs on UNIX/Linux, MacOS > and Windows and has a mobile version too, useful later, see > below). In its basic form, you could even have it use the > raw, whole display. Even I like SuperBASIC very much and it was the programming language my career started with I must say that there's no need for S*BASIC in 20xx. Even with SMSQ/E think of its limitations like "stick with line numbers", very limited datatypes (only the string datatype is somehow 21st century, no 32bit integers, no usable floating point format), no modularity (you have to handle "modules" on your), no object orientation (OOP) at all, no IDE (ED is all we have built in, no debugger, nothing; OK, you can add QREF, other Toolkits, use QMON for S*BASIC trace/debug -> arghh, etc. pp.), GUI programming only as an add-on (QPTR, EasyPTR, TurboPTR). I use Microsoft VisualBasic (VB) since version 5 (1997). Since version 4 (1996) VB superceded SuperBASIC in all aspects. OK, it took M$ - the company which did almost all (well, at least over 50%) BASIC interpreters available in the early 80s - more than 10 years to beat Jan Jones's design. Even I loved VB v6 the most of all VBs, I currently work with V10 (Visual Studio 2010). As Norman mentioned before there are free editions of powerful Microsoft packages such as Visual Studio (the Integrated Development Environment with different programming languages) or SQL Server (the very powerful relational database). Just try it out! http://www.microsoft.com/express/downloads/ In my opinion there are only two drawbacks of such modern platforms: 1. (Relatively) huge packages and therefore not that easy to get an overview. 2. BOOT up times like we love from the good old Sinclair computers (power-on until first statement written less than 10 seconds) are not possible, not even with latest CPUs, gigs of hyperfast RAM and superfast SSDs (solid state drives). Urs _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
