Op Mon, 28 Jun 2010 10:30:30 +0300 schreef Urs Koenig (QL) <q...@bluewin.ch>:
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
A recognisable story.
It was seeing Basic programming demonstrated that sparked my interest in
computers.
I also read a few dozen of the many comments. Although some admit to
starting of in ZX-Basic, most seem to agree that Basic is bad for the
brain and makes it more difficult to get your head around higher level
languages like C++. These would allow thinking more like a human than like
the machine. But it seems to me that they rely a lot on libraries of
routines that do the actual work and somebody has to understand and speak
at the machine level to make this happen.
Personally I think highly of those low-level programmers.
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)...
I use QD and BasicLinker, this makes line numbers irrelevant.
Since Qubide, QXL, Qx0, QPC there are plenty IDE options and with all the
toolkits loaded it's still a lot more compact than your VB.
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).
Will we still love our QLing if the overhead to get there, keeps piling up?
Bob
--
The BSJR QL software site at: http://members.chello.nl/b.spelten/ql/
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