On 01/17/2017 01:41 AM, Evan Koblentz via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
After posting my assembly-for-newbs question, it occurred to me that perhaps I should be asking this instead: with no experience other than LOGO and then BASIC, which (period 1980s) language should I learn next? Was it normal to go from BASIC directly to assembly (is BASIC enough preparation), or were people better off getting some in-between experience with a language such as Pascal or something else?
It seems most of the time the path people took depended upon what was available to them on the platform they were using. I learned Pascal first after several transient exposures to BASIC, because a very good Pascal compiler (Borland's Turbo Pascal under CP/M) was made available to me by a friend for the system I was running. If it weren't for that, I likely wouldn't have had the opportunity to learn Pascal until much later, and I would've gone with something else. My other friends mostly started out with BASIC because that was in the ROMs of their VIC-20s, TRS-80s, and Ataris. Even the one guy (with rich parents) with the Apple ][. So knowing what people did "back in the day" from my perspective probably isn't all that helpful in your situation, as most everything is available to you now. Some folks have suggested that you pick a goal or a project and choose the language based on that. That seems logical to me.
Keep in mind that my natural aptitude is liberal arts, not math. :)
Well one mistake certainly might be thinking it has something to do with math. ;) -Dave -- Dave McGuire, AK4HZ New Kensington, PA