Do aspiring programmers benefit from learning BASIC (or a variant) first?

[Retro1234]

I'm not gonna get into it but your reply just shows how pretentious it is, you think understanding OOP concepts is hard which in itself is very worying. I personally don't agree with the statement an object is an instance of a class. I personally think this was something badly translated once and just never got corrected. If you look up the word instance and it's meaning in the English directory it doesn't make sense. If you said an object is a real interpretation of a class that would make sense. it's pretentious rubbish.

It's like saying an object is an example of the blueprint lol. It's not an example it is the object made from the blueprint.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Thorham

The sane way.

Is it? It's probably the decision that is single handedly responsible for 90% of security vulnerabilities in the wild. Like a lot of decisions in the design of C, it was of its time and incredibly short sighted.

Originally Posted by Thorham

This is rather illuminating: Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language

Some of those are questionable, and most fixed in compilers as time went on. But I'm not saying Pascal was the perfect language (I don't believe one exists), merely that it was better for teaching good code structure than the BASIC implementations of the time.

[Locutus]

Originally Posted by fxgogo

That is very true. BBC BASIC for example had procedures/functions. I would say it was easily the best 8bit version of BASIC. Even today, it is an amazingly well designed system.

We might need to add two extra generations that preceed the 8bit home micros. If you look at the original BASIC from Dartmouth, it was a language that needed compiling and was mainframe based.

Later, we had the mini-computers and that is where the interpreted approach started to happen, and that was mostly because it was a cost saving over the mainframes.

A lot was lost in the 8bit reimplementations of BASIC in the 70s. I checked the Darthmouth docs and they introduced functions (with arguments) in 68.


By the time the 8 Bit BASIC's where being implemented 'full fat'-BASIC already had structured programming support.


Important to keep in mind that access to documentation and large systems wasn't a thing, so many BASIC implementers likely independently re-invented the full Darthmouth feature set later in the 80's such as BBC BASIC did.


source: https://ia601901.us.archive.org/34/i...Jan68_text.pdf page 42 onwards.

[Daedalus]

Yeah, naturally there were the predecessors to the 8-bit micro Basics, but very few people had exposure to those. I expect most of the nicer features like procedures and locals got ditched when the interpreters were scaled down to run on an 8-bit machine with very limited resources. And it was these cut-down versions that were many people's first exposure to computer programming.

Yeah, BBC Basic was excellent - when I was using the BBC in primary school I remember being slightly jealous of some of its features compared to Basic on the Atari XL I had at home. In 8-bit terms it was ahead of most other versions in terms of power. From memory, most Basics were stripped down to fit tight ROM size requirements, and the BBC designers allowed a larger ROM for Basic than most machines.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I personally don't agree with the statement an object is an instance of a class. I personally think this was something badly translated once and just never got corrected. If you look up the word instance and it's meaning in the English directory it doesn't make sense.

"instance
noun
noun: instance; plural noun: instances
an example or single occurrence of something"

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Is it?

What else to do if you're not going to have a struct with a pointer to the array and an integer for the length? Didn't they omit this for memory consumption reasons?

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

It's probably the decision that is single handedly responsible for 90% of security vulnerabilities in the wild.

Yeah, but according to you Pascal allows doing this with pointers, and in C you could make a proper array struct if you want.

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

it was better for teaching good code structure than the BASIC implementations of the time

That's true. Structured vs unstructured is no contest.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

I'm not gonna get into it but your reply just shows how pretentious it is, you think understanding OOP concepts is hard which in itself is very worying.

No, I don't think that (really, ha ha ), I just think that you don't know OOP because you never bothered to get into it at all.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by TCD

"instance
noun
noun: instance; plural noun: instances
an example or single occurrence of something"

[Retro1234]

How can an object be an occurrence or an example lol. Just drival buzz words.


I think you can tell I'm not impressed at all by the scene and the people.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Just drival buzz words.

It's just what these things are called. What else to call the things in this example then:

public class Test // this is a class
{
    private int foo = 0;
    
    public int Bar(int a)
    {
        foo += a;

        return foo;
    }
}

Test abc = new Test(); // this an object (instance of a class)

Also, how is this pretentious? What you're saying makes little sense.

[Dunny]

My BASIC interpreter is a class. And I run an instance of it. This is not a complex thing to understand.

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

It's like saying an object is an example of the blueprint lol. It's not an example it is the object made from the blueprint.

Because a class isn't a blueprint. I've seen that example used as a kind of hand-wavy explanation of the difference between a class and an instance of a class, but it's not strictly correct.

The source code of the class is the blueprint, a class is what the thing is,.and an instance is a specific case of one of those things.

[Locutus]

The 'Blueprint' idea goes away quickly once you start introducing (multiple) inheritance, polymorphism and working with abstract classes with multiple implementations.

(All of these have completely valid applications)

That simple mapping just doesn't help to reason about these things, and I'm sorry to pile on. It shows you have no understanding of OOP.

Unless ofcourse you keep stretching your idea of a 'Blueprint' to the point that you are describing a class system, but then you just as well might use the established terminology, which amusingly enough doesn't even really come from computer programming!

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Dunny

Here's my BASIC interpreter, written in Pascal: https://www.youtube.com/@ZXDunny/videos

I always wanted Spectrum BASIC but... more. Now I have it. I can do all the things I wanted to do when I was a kid but was too immature to learn asm

Looks great!

Watched the video in action, found the project here:
https://github.com/ZXDunny/SpecBAS

[alkis]

Yes, but not because it was BASIC. Aspiring programmers benefit from the first language they learn.
So, in the 80s that was probably BASIC yeah.
It's probably python now. So in 50 years, a similar question will be formed around Python.

I think Basic would have had a chance if it was standardized. There are 1500 different implementations around. That must have held the language back.

Here's my top five.

1. C
2. C++
3. C#/Java
4. End of the world
5. Python

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by alkis

Yes, but not because it was BASIC. Aspiring programmers benefit from the first language they learn.
So, in the 80s that was probably BASIC yeah.
It's probably python now. So in 50 years, a similar question will be formed around Python.

I think Basic would have had a chance if it was standardized. There are 1500 different implementations around. That must have held the language back.

Here's my top five.

1. C
2. C++
3. C#/Java
4. End of the world
5. Python

Hehe, regarding "4." before "5.", and I do agree about Basic being good for what it was back then, but it can still be useful.

I think any language is fine, but I want double pay if someone want something written in TCL.

[Retro1234]

Well this is the thing now the definition of Instance has changed and on StackOverflow you'll get a hundred different replies or whatever, no I think it means this or that. It's not good.

Back on topic - I feel BASIC was a gateway into programming and a middle ground. I feel that is missing now. But then again I've never been able to grasp ASM always been a bit jealous of those guys. But in general my feeling is the middle ground in missing. Maybe engines are the way because people expect much better graphics now days etc. But the whole Stackoverflow thing and the general types involved are? In general not nice.

It doesn't even have to be BASIC - I guess that's progress but something that grabs the attention of the Average Jo and particularly young person. Get rid of this Elitism.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Retro1234

Well this is the thing now the definition of Instance has changed and on StackOverflow you'll get a hundred different replies or whatever,

No it hasn't. And no you won't, your question will get closed for being a very obvious duplicate.

[Daedalus]

Indeed, instance has meant the same thing to me for decades now. Care to share some examples of how it has changed?

I've mentioned it before, but perhaps it's just that you need to be better at formulating clear questions that can have clear answers. That will help when Googling for solutions as well as posting on Stack Overflow.

[Retro1234]

I think is part of the problem. Obviously, I don't change definitions -read above first and it's just an observation about the dweebs on Stackoverflow, it's a creepy place for sure.

I regard them as absolute dweebs who shut down threads for the most pathetic reasons. I would never waste time there.