Re: [vcf-midatlantic] Perhaps I asked the wrong question...
william degnan via vcf-midatlantic writes:
BASIC is the universal language for demos in a museum setting when you're just showing something that you can execute in real time.
ROTFLMAO!
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Brian Schenkenberger via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
william degnan via vcf-midatlantic writes:
BASIC is the universal language for demos in a museum setting when you're just showing something that you can execute in real time.
ROTFLMAO!
Brian, Might you be a tad biased? What language other than BASIC is most present on the machines in the museum? I should have said the universal language for demos in our museum setting. Sometimes you have to be practical rather than theoretical. Pascal? C? Assembly? For museum demos? This thread is full of "what I would do's" rather than what is reasonable, efficient and practical specifically for Evan to use and self-support. Bill
I would suggest C as the next most historically important language that is still in widespread use today. (probably tied with Cobol, for historical importance, but people are not, in general, writing new things in Cobol today, unlike C). The story of the development of C is intertwined with the development of Unix, and both were initially developed in the 70's, on machines like the PDP-11. Plus, C compilers exist for (probably) all the microprocessors now, even if they didn't exist back when those processors were "current". C (and C++) is the language of the Arduino IDE, so a knowledge of C allows you to build stuff with Arduino, which is a wonderful hacker/DIY platform. I think C is a fairly straight forward language to learn; It's still procedural, like Basic, but has more sophisticated control constructs so you can write programs that are easier to understand. Bill Dudley This email is free of malware because I run Linux. On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:12 AM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Brian Schenkenberger via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
william degnan via vcf-midatlantic writes:
BASIC is the universal language for demos in a museum setting when you're just showing something that you can execute in real time.
ROTFLMAO!
Brian, Might you be a tad biased? What language other than BASIC is most present on the machines in the museum? I should have said the universal language for demos in our museum setting. Sometimes you have to be practical rather than theoretical. Pascal? C? Assembly? For museum demos? This thread is full of "what I would do's" rather than what is reasonable, efficient and practical specifically for Evan to use and self-support. Bill
Agree with Pascal as the next step up for the reasons Jeff mentioned. However, C would be a great third language to learn because it is also historically significant, there are many implementations available on almost every platform, and it is easy to do in-line assembler when you get to that level of advancement. It's also a good stepping off point for learning something like Python. On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:57 AM, William Dudley via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I would suggest C as the next most historically important language that is still in widespread use today. (probably tied with Cobol, for historical importance, but people are not, in general, writing new things in Cobol today, unlike C).
The story of the development of C is intertwined with the development of Unix, and both were initially developed in the 70's, on machines like the PDP-11.
Plus, C compilers exist for (probably) all the microprocessors now, even if they didn't exist back when those processors were "current".
C (and C++) is the language of the Arduino IDE, so a knowledge of C allows you to build stuff with Arduino, which is a wonderful hacker/DIY platform.
I think C is a fairly straight forward language to learn; It's still procedural, like Basic, but has more sophisticated control constructs so you can write programs that are easier to understand.
Bill Dudley
This email is free of malware because I run Linux.
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:12 AM, william degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 19, 2017 at 8:01 AM, Brian Schenkenberger via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
william degnan via vcf-midatlantic writes:
BASIC is the universal language for demos in a museum setting when you're just showing something that you can execute in real time.
ROTFLMAO!
Brian, Might you be a tad biased? What language other than BASIC is most present on the machines in the museum? I should have said the universal language for demos in our museum setting. Sometimes you have to be practical rather than theoretical. Pascal? C? Assembly? For museum demos? This thread is full of "what I would do's" rather than what is reasonable, efficient and practical specifically for Evan to use and self-support. Bill
participants (4)
-
Dean Notarnicola -
VAXman＠tmesis.org -
william degnan -
William Dudley