What Programming Languages do you use?

[zamosc]

I got talking last night with a few friends and we were reminiscing on our days with C64 BASIC. The latter made think to myself - 'wow, only if BASIC was used and extended like Python, but ran like Go in that it could be compiled or ran as interrupted'. It would be a real skookum programming language with new features.

I guess the downside would be no OOP concepts, since BASIC didn't support OOP until .NET VB.

I played with VB6.0 but never .NET BASIC. Around the time .NET BASIC came out, I was taking courses to be a marine diesel mechanic and accounting and programming was the farthest thing in my mind. ++laugh++ I still used a C64 way up into early 2000s up until the point instructors stopped accepting papers typed and printed from my c64.

 

[aramis]

QB64 is a compiled basic still developed. Freeware. Head dev's pricklier than a cactus on a good day, but the program works really well.

It's using the MS Q-basic dialect, extended heavily, and built for modern 64-bit windows or Mac. The IDE is modeled on MSQB4.x

It can, with one of the extensions, supposedly do android. I've not tried.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I played with VB6.0 but never .NET BASIC. Around the time .NET BASIC came out, I was taking courses to be a marine diesel mechanic and accounting and programming was the farthest thing in my mind. ++laugh++ I still used a C64 way up into early 2000s up until the point instructors stopped accepting papers typed and printed from my c64.

The last BASIC I programmed in full-time was Basic09 for the TANDY Color Computer 3. I remember it being very structured like Pascal. Very modular.

But then Windows95 dropped. And I ditched all that. The BASIC it came with was several gens backwards. So I didn't program anything for awhile.

 

[zamosc]

QB64 is a compiled basic still developed. Freeware. Head dev's pricklier than a cactus on a good day, but the program works really well.

It's using the MS Q-basic dialect, extended heavily, and built for modern 64-bit windows or Mac. The IDE is modeled on MSQB4.x

It can, with one of the extensions, supposedly do android. I've not tried.

I will have to check it out. Thank you.

 

[zamosc]

The last BASIC I programmed in full-time was Basic09 for the TANDY Color Computer 3. I remember it being very structured like Pascal. Very modular.

But then Windows95 dropped. And I ditched all that. The BASIC it came with was several gens backwards. So I didn't program anything for awhile.

I never had a Tandy personally, but I think at one time they had the best graphics until Amiga came out.

 

[zamosc]

I saw BBC Basic on RiscOS has been released as open source. Could have a promising ecosystem on ARM, since it was ported to ARM by Acron back in the day. Not sure if you can compile on any ARM cpu and run any ARM device, so I guess I will have to play with it.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I never had a Tandy personally, but I think at one time they had the best graphics until Amiga came out.

It was kind of in-between the Atari 800 and the Atari ST. Then yes, the Amiga replaced things.

 

[willtron3030]

I had an Atari 400 in my late teens, and after Eastern Front was released, I was dead set on becoming the next Chris Crawford. Sadly, I discovered I hated 6502 Assembly... none of the charm of a VAX.

When Amigas came out, I was stunned to see it implemented REXX as the shell command language. I'd expected some DOS CLI lookalike or BASIC REPL.

The only thing more amazing than Amiga graphics was Amiga *audio*.

 

[agorski]

Sadly, I discovered I hated 6502 Assembly... none of the charm of a VAX.

Hi William. I really liked the 6502 instruction set, it was almost a RISC architecture. My work took me to programming assembly on the PDP-11, and that was a very easy transition.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

I hated Z80 ASM. But loved 6809 ASM.

 

[whartung]

I hated Z80 ASM. But loved 6809 ASM.

6809 like PDP-11 is basically cheating.

 

[ShawnDriscoll]

6809 like PDP-11 is basically cheating.

Well, I needed to program using re-entrant position-independent code while running Microware's version of UNIX at the time.

 

[aramis]

I hated Z80 ASM. But loved 6809 ASM.

Hardware multiplication! Crikey!
And about 8x the price of the 6502 back in the day...

 

[willtron3030]

Hi William. I really liked the 6502 instruction set, it was almost a RISC architecture. My work took me to programming assembly on the PDP-11, and that was a very easy transition.

I was 18, and I was lazy. 12 GP registers was such a warm, coddling environment to play in.

MERLIN made 6502 assembler pretty easy on Apple II, gleefully pointing out my mistakes at every turn, save those moments where it did EXACTLY what I incorrectly told it to.

Atari, for some reason, made 6502 painful. The details of that pain are mostly blanked by hysterical amnesia, but there was something about the way Atari OS restricted my use of zero-page addressing that made me want to take up knitting.

 

[whartung]

Atari, for some reason, made 6502 painful. The details of that pain are mostly blanked by hysterical amnesia, but there was something about the way Atari OS restricted my use of zero-page addressing that made me want to take up knitting.

Curious, the base OS on the Atari only used the first half of ZP, the rest was available to programs.

BASIC used the second half pretty heavily. So if you were doing assembly and BASIC, it could get a bit tight.

 

[willtron3030]

Curious, the base OS on the Atari only used the first half of ZP, the rest was available to programs.

BASIC used the second half pretty heavily. So if you were doing assembly and BASIC, it could get a bit tight.

I think that was my handicap. And I could never be accused of being an economical coder back then.

 

[aramis]

I think that was my handicap. And I could never be accused of being an economical coder back then.

Spaghetti Code may have become unacceptable, but economical coding is less common now than ever before...

Then again, almost no one codes in Assembly anymore, either. Tho' there seems to be a renaissance in low-level programming, with high power symbolic assemblers (named variables, named jump targets, etc).

 

[willtron3030]

Spaghetti Code may have become unacceptable, but economical coding is less common now than ever before...

Then again, almost no one codes in Assembly anymore, either. Tho' there seems to be a renaissance in low-level programming, with high power symbolic assemblers (named variables, named jump targets, etc).

MERLIN was a step in that direction.

I've been putting off looking at the toolchains available for WebAssembly. Maybe too much has changed; maybe not enough.

 

[whartung]

MERLIN was a step in that direction.

I've been putting off looking at the toolchains available for WebAssembly. Maybe too much has changed; maybe not enough.

I don't know, but I don't think anyone writes WebAssembly by hand, that's not its purpose or goal at all.

 

[willtron3030]

I don't know, but I don't think anyone writes WebAssembly by hand, that's not its purpose or goal at all.

Agreed. But I just wonder if there's anything out there besides LLVM. I avoid JavaScript when I can. C++ and Go don't appeal to me when I'm just noodling around. It's silly to hope for support of non-statically-typed languages, e.g. Python.

auses: :consults the googles:

There's even a COBOL compiler for wasm. Pascal, too.

Python, not so much.