

Learning 80’s style programming today - loumf
http://www.atalasoft.com/cs/blogs/loufranco/archive/2010/06/21/learning-80-s-style-programming-today.aspx

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jerf
I am really unsympathetic to the idea that programming has gotten harder to
get into. It has, but only because of the sheer explosion of alternatives
drowning out programming, which is not the point people try to make. In
absolutely terms it is still easy, and actually easier than ever. It was never
_easy_ , it was just one of a much smaller set of choices.

Further edit: It occurs to me I have a relevant anecdote. I was never able to
get into assembler on the Commodore 64, having gotten as far as I really could
with Basic. I actually had an assembler, but no documentation. I had no
ability to get documentation, no idea where to find it, nobody to even ask,
hardly any clue that I _should_ be asking. I managed to wedge my computer a
few times just typing some vaguely assemblish stuff into it, but no more.
Today, www.google.com -> "Commodore 64 assembly" (no quotes) yields
<http://www.c64.ch/programming/> as the first hit.

Yeah, it's gotten a lot easier.

~~~
petercooper
Not only that, but getting help is crazy easy nowadays. In the 80's you either
had to know someone experienced in real life, buy books, or just pootle around
figuring it out for yourself.

~~~
tkahn6
I still have not physically met any person my own age that can program more
than a little Java and I'm about to enter college. And I've never known an
adult IRL that has been able to teach me any CS or programming.

Very much almost exclusively my knowledge of programming comes from reading
books and 'pootling' around (and I started in 2000).

I think it's more a matter of where you live than what age you live in.

~~~
chc
I think you're just taking a lot for granted. You're posting about how you
don't know anyone who can program or teach you about CS _on a site full of
computer scientists_. Nowadays you can post any question imaginable on Stack
Overflow and get answers quickly, often from the world's top experts. You
discount all this because you haven't met these people physically, but really,
who cares? That is so much more than you have 20, 30 years ago.

"Where you live" is precisely the thing that matters least now. As long as you
have access to the Internet, you're only seconds away from anybody in the
world.

~~~
tkahn6
It's not a problem now. I have an exponentially better idea of where to look
when I want answers to a question that I did when I was 12 or 13.

The single largest hurdle for learning on your own is knowing the right
questions to ask and how and where to ask them. Sites like HN and SO are great
but it's a matter of finding them (and neither SO nor HN have existed for very
long).

(and btw I didn't downmod you)

~~~
petercooper
_The single largest hurdle for learning on your own is knowing the right
questions to ask and how and where to ask them._

That's an interesting point, though pre 2001-ish I'd suggest this was
_easier._ Usenet was the obvious destination. Groups like comp.lang.c,
comp.lang.basic.misc and rec.game.design were popular and easy to find.
Nowadays, there are 1001 different sites (many with poor traffic) for every
topic imaginable.

Sadly, Usenet seemed to fall on its ass and be usurped by the Web somewhere
between 2000 and 2003. A shame, that.

~~~
tkahn6
If I had known what the usenet was at the time I would have really found
useful. I was super ignorant of those types of things until I was about 14 or
15.

I'll consolidate our discussion into this one thread, in saying that I did use
the internet to learn but I used it rather poorly. My Google-fu was rather
terrible when I was younger. Tackling a large subject like programming was not
easy for me when I basically had no footholds or easy ways to enter that body
of knowledge.

I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to learn how to program _without_
the internet though I think that as we build more powerful consumer-grade
computing systems, the hurdles involved in getting into programming get higher
and become more numerous.

~~~
blinks
> I cannot imagine how hard it must have been to learn how to program without
> the internet[.]

Personally, the hard part was getting good documentation, though my parents'
286 came with a manual on GW-BASIC, which was included. I also managed to
procure some BASIC documentation at a garage sale.

Basically impossible to learn _computer science_ , though, except by trial and
error. I just did things ad hoc. Experience teaches you how not to do things,
but slowly.

~~~
petercooper
_Basically impossible to learn computer science, though, except by trial and
error._

This is a good point. I'd been coding for over ten years before I was even
introduced to the (actually rather important) concept of algorithmic
complexity! If I'd taken CS in university, that wouldn't have been the case.
Now, though, it's possible for even novices to be introduced to these topics
online (depending on who they're talking to).

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allenp
I don't think flash gets enough credit in this regard. Despite its many flaws,
the sheer volume of people exposed to programming concepts from tinkering with
flash is enormous.

I think one of the biggest reasons for this is the ease of IO, and the type of
communities that have formed around its use, like Newgrounds.

~~~
abstractbill
And if you use haXe instead of Adobe's tools, it's not hard to put together a
reasonably sane Flash development environment.

I agree, Flash is a decent choice for the same reasons BASIC was awesome in
the 80s - kids love to make noises and draw/animate graphics. Javascript is
catching up on the graphics front, but sound is sadly still just not there.

------
forinti
The context was completely different. Controlling what appeared on your TV was
quite a novelty! And there weren't other interesting things to do on a
computer, except for games.

~~~
loumf
On page 5 of the programming guide, it has a list of things you can download
from CompuServe.

Partial list:

* Games

* Store-front advertising display (flashing and animated)

* Home Babysitter -- teaches kids the alphabet

* business spreadsheet

* sports data (subscription service on compuserve)

* stock quotes (subscription service on compuserve)

Granted, I mostly just played games and hacked programs, but I had a word
processor and got a copy of GEOS (GUI windowing environment)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)>

------
ygd
"It would be trivial for Microsoft to provide a version of BASIC that kids
could use, whenever they wanted, to type in all those textbook examples."

They do, it's called Small Basic.

Although this was written in 2006, before Small Basic existed.

------
petercooper
After the first paragraph I thought this article was going to say how learning
"80's style programming" isn't a good thing in the 2010s, rather than support
that Python fits pretty well into it ;-) There's something to be said for 80's
style educational style, but I'm not sure we should hang on to the same style
of programming.

~~~
loumf
I keep seeing articles that worry about not being able to do this, and I just
wanted to show that you pretty much could if you wanted to (no need to buy a
C64 as the Salon article author did).

I think if someone asked me how to get started hacking around, I'd suggest
HTML/Javascript or Processing. They both have the advantage of being very easy
to deploy the output if you want (for sharing). They also have progressive
enhancement (meaning you can start knowing only a few simple things and learn
more as you need it)

~~~
Jeema3000
I agree that Javascript is the true heir to BASIC. It's available on pretty
much every computer out-of-the-box, much in the same way that BASIC was in the
80s. It's also a lot easier to deploy and share, as you said.

