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

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by Thorham

C# and Java are just general purpose languages. Most games are written in languages that aren't specifically designed for writing games.

pretty much every game for mobile is c# these days, since javascript fell out of favour

[NorthWay]

I grew up with C= 64 basic and knew no other version of it. You soon floated into hardware handling and understanding 6510 architecture by necessity, but in retrospect I find it peculiar that the "native" number format was floating point and not integer, and that there was not a clear distinction in when, where and how to use those different formats.

But I did hate magazine listings with all those print codes that gave you a headache. That one was all on C= though.

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by DanScott

pretty much every game for mobile is c# these days, since javascript fell out of favour

Probably because of Unity.

[aeberbach]

Originally Posted by DanScott

pretty much every game for mobile is c# these days, since javascript fell out of favour

Eh? Surely it's mostly kotlin/swift for mobile.

[Locutus]

C# or rather the specific set offered by Unity is super common for mobile *games*.

For apps however you are right with native applications, for new code bases it then quickly bisects in either Kotlin on Android or Swift on iOS.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I would argue yes, but not with AmigaBASIC. It was terrible.

I moved up from a Spectrum - where I coded in BASIC mostly - to an A1000 in very late '87 and it naturally came with AmigaBASIC.

I powered it up and after about an hour decided to drop it for now. It was bloody awful. Slow, even compared to the Spectrum, and with a horrifically designed IDE. Didn't go back to coding on the Amiga until much later.

I ran Rugg/Feldman benchmark #5 on a stock A500 and ZX Spectrum +2 in 48k mode. The results were:-

A500: 5.2 seconds

ZX Spectrum: 22 seconds (4.3 times slower)

The classic empty for/next benchmark showed an even greater difference.

(Amiga BASIC)
FOR I% = 1 TO 10000
NEXT I%

(Sinclair BASIC)
10 FOR I = 1 TO 10000
20 NEXT I

Results:-

Amiga BASIC: 2 seconds

Sinclair BASIC: 41 seconds (20.5 times slower)

But perhaps you are talking about the editor, not the interpreter?

In Amiga BASIC you have to type key words in full, whereas Sinclair BASIC types them out when you press their hotkeys. On the Spectrum's rubber keyboard this may be faster than typing full words. Only problem is you have know which key(s) to press. The +2 provides no hints on the key caps, so it took me ages to type in that 9 line benchmark (didn't use 128K BASIC because it's known to be slower).

Amiga BASIC has automatic keyword capitalization and auto indent, as well as structured format which makes lines numbers redundant. Scrolling is at least as fast as on the Spectrum and you can instantly put the cursor anywhere with the mouse. Using labels (when needed) instead of line numbers, indenting, white-space and structured programming makes the code much easier to read and organize. This is what BASIC should be, not pages of dense spaghetti code with peculiar lines numbers and REMarks everywhere to tell you what it does!

And yet, despite Amiga BASIC's objective superiority to Sinclair BASIC, you perceived it as 'slow, even compared to the Spectrum'. There are a few things I can think of that might give that impression:-

1. A stock WB1.x A500 is quite slow at rendering windows and text. Amiga BASIC uses 'simple refresh' windows to keep the memory footprint down, so it has to refresh the listing window after any part of it has been obscured.

2. The error requester can only be acknowledged with the mouse. Beginners tend to make make many errors which require cancelling that damn requester!

3. When you scroll it doesn't flush the keyboard buffer, so if you were holding the cursor key down it keeps going until the buffer is cleared out.

4. No file requester (not surprising for an application released in 1986 - the OS didn't have one and the custom file requesters supplied with some other programs were often quite dire).

These are minor annoyances, but could be frustrating to a new user who was fluent in BASIC on some other machine and had gotten used to its peculiarities. It didn't worry me though. Line-numbered BASICs were always a pain, and the machines they ran on were so slow!

The real problem with Amiga BASIC is that it isn't 32 bit pure and so can't run at full speed on 32 bit CPUs, which is a shame. The answer to that is Hisoft BASIC, which is almost 100% compatible and produces complied code that runs much faster.

[Dunny]

Indeed, the editor was most of the pain - alongside actually trying to actually do anything with it. I picked up AMOS and Blitz a couple of years later and they flew by comparison.

As for the token keys on a speccy... I still know them all even now

My own implementation of Sinclair BASIC doesn't use them however, though I did the right thing and kept the line numbers.

[Karlos]

Basic was never my thing but I remember Blitz being OK

[CCCP alert]

Commodore V2 BASIC is really just an introduction to machine code, you have to know all the registers and how to use them to do anything beyond silent PETSCII graphic adventures me and my friend wrote

On top of that you need to learn binary maths to draw your sprites too!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by Dunny

I picked up AMOS and Blitz a couple of years later and they flew by comparison.

Never used Blitz, but AMOS is sooooo much better than Amiga Basic. You can actually make something nice with it if you're skilled.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Never used Blitz, but AMOS is sooooo much better than Amiga Basic. You can actually make something nice with it if you're skilled.

I just couldn't get into AMOS, it felt too weird and alien. I assume this is less so with AMOS Pro since it seems to support intuition properly.

I liked Blitz though. Features I liked were that it compiles down to binaries, plays nicely with the OS, supports structures (or records as it calls them) and some nice builtin types like fixed point numbers and stuff.

Horses for courses though. Whatever you find fun and are most productive with.

[Karlos]

Did anyone use HiSoft Basic?

I remember it being advertised as the more premium one

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Never used Blitz, but AMOS is sooooo much better than Amiga Basic. You can actually make something nice with it if you're skilled.

I made so much stuff in AMOSPro - when I started working as a programmer/musician for an Amiga outfit in '93 they gave me a copy of AMOSPro to use and dammit I made so much good stuff that I have no idea where it is now.

And personal stuff too - dungeon master style 3D view on a Hack-like dungeon crawler, lightsynth, various demos and suchlike.

Blitz was even better, so much faster.

[modrobert]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Did anyone use HiSoft Basic?

I remember it being advertised as the more premium one

Never tried, but looks pretty impressive:
http://cd.textfiles.com/amigama/amig...rres/hsb2.html

Besides being compiled Basic (as opposed to interpreter) with IDE and debugger (it's MonAM), especially like these features...

* Link in Devpac 3 Assembly and SAS/C functions!
* Amiga.Lib functions fully supported, Full AGA support.
* Programs are compatible with all version of the OS from 1.3 to 3.1. Some new facilities are restricted under WB 1.3

[Daedalus]

I never used it myself, but it never really stood out as having anything significant that Blitz didn't have. Linking to external ASM/C functions does sound handy I guess, it's never something I missed with Blitz, which can use inline ASM and can access standard OS libraries. I must give it a whirl at some point though when I have the time - it's always been at the back of my mind, as was said, as the premium BASIC product of the time.

[nogginthenog]

I quite liked AmigaBasic at the time. It gave you access to most of the OS. Windows, Screens, BOBs, sprites etc

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

4. No file requester (not surprising for an application released in 1986 - the OS didn't have one and the custom file requesters supplied with some other programs were often quite dire).

AmigaBasic had a FD convertor so you could call ASL library requesters (and I did).

[Daedalus]

Yep, though asl.library was only a thing from Kickstart 2 on. Blitz worked around this by providing its own custom fallback requester if you called the ASL requester on a 1.x machine.

[Karlos]

Ruminating on the original question the OP posed, are we talking about aspiring programmers in general or people aspiring to write programs specifically for the Amiga?

Other than BASIC, what other languages that are suitable for people just getting to grips with the concepts are there for thr Amiga? I remember there was Pascal, too.

I personally think that BASIC dialects do
so much by keywords that it can leave you unprepared for moving on to more sophisticated programming paradigms. This doesn't matter if you just want to write simple things but it depends on how far your aspirations go.