Given what Bill Deg said. I would suggest a rough introduction to each language emphasizing a general overview. For the purposes of being a docent one needn't need to be able to program in the language, only a general idea. A comparison chart would be interesting. On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 7:46 AM william degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Sticking with BASIC for now. There is much left for me to learn in this
language.
New fork for this discussion: someday, if I ever have bunches of free
time
(ha!), maybe I should learn another high-level language. I now realize
that
could be any number of choices: C, COBOL, Forth, Fortran, Pascal, Java,
and
others .... which would be easiest for a liberal arts person like me to
transition into from BASIC, and which would best serve me as a tour guide
at the museum?
BASIC is the universal language for demos in a museum setting when you're
just showing something that you can execute in real time.
There is nothing wrong with concluding that formal programming is not for
you, it's a lot like music, painting, writing, etc. Most everyone has
their strengths and weaknesses.
A person can be a great programmer but incapable of writing a good user
interface, directions, help screens, etc. Maybe you can team up with a
programmer...write the interface and screens for museum projects how you'd
like them and then get someone to code them up. In most businesses the
programmers are not also tasked with anything other than the actual
programming itself, a team contributes to the finished product.
Bill