Linked by Roberto J. Dohnert on Wed 28th Jul 2004 17:23 UTC
Most of us that work in the IT industry have been around for a long time. We started out in our parents basement writing code in some BASIC environment, ussually Commodore BASIC or QBASIC. Do you remember how thrilling it was? Your first program and it was something extremely basic but the point was it worked. Some of us got hooked right away and kept trying to solve problems and added more and more pushing the capabilities of whatever language we used. As we got older the environments progressed and the programming tools progressed and got more complicated.
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I remember the days of hobbyist computing in the 1980s, with all the various versions of BASIC that started right up and gave you all sorts of neat power. The author presents numerous environments here, but few of them (as far as I can tell) are INTERPRETED languages. If you really want to experiment with what a computer can do, you need to have an interpreted language that does some neat things right out of the box and that comes with a solid manual with short but fun programs.
To quibble on a technicality, when you say "INTERPRETED" what you really mean is "Dynamic". You can have all of the benefits many associate with an interpreted system in a dynamic system that actually compiles the code on the fly for you. Like I said, it's a quibble.
Back In The Day, your editor started with a "READY" prompt. If you had a more advanced system (Commadore, Atari), you could actually cursor around the screen and edit code that way beyond simply retyping line numbered statements.
The beauty of those systems, besides their basic compactness, was that you were able work with your program in an interactive environment. Run the program, hit BREAK (or put STOP in your code), change a variable, type CONT and move on.
Try out simple code at the prompt, etc. Need to "Unit Test" a function? GOSUB 1000 at the prompt.
Add in some high level routines for sound and sprites, and you were able to quickly get Interesting things with quick results and turn around.
For polished, finished programs, you still had to do "more work", maybe get into machine language, or whatever.
But the system's were pretty painlessly accessible.
The biggest curse is that the BASICs didn't really encourage "modern" structural coding technique. But even then a lot a interesting programs and technique were learned by having access to a "simple" 8K ROM and a READY prompt.