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The browser has always been the one of the easiest ways of tinkering with programming, but these days our browsers come with sophisticated developer tools unlik
by niftich 10y ago
The browser has always been the one of the easiest ways of tinkering with programming, but these days our browsers come with sophisticated developer tools unlike anything else installed on an average person's PC.
Back when I didn't know anything about compilers I wanted to write 'C++' but didn't understand how I could produce an executable, I instead saved html and js into folder and loaded them up in the browser -- and any changes were visible on refresh.
And actually, these days this tinkering doesn't even have to take place locally. With sites like jsfiddle, anyone can develop remotely while still being able to debug the execution from the browser.
- homero 10y agoThat's how I first fell in love with PHP
- rahimnathwani 10y ago1980s: Computers come with a BASIC interpreter 2000s: Computers come with a web browser that can run JS 2010s: Computers come with a web browser that can run JS and has some other tools But what was available in the early 1990s, when IBM-compatible PCs had become cheap enough to have at home, but ~everyone ran DOS+Windows? I don't remember there being any way (unless you count BAT files) to easily get started writing programs. For those who got their first taste of programming in the 90s, what language and compiler/IDE did you use?
- endgame 10y agoMS-DOS came with GW-Basic and later QBasic, and the latter lives on in QB64: http://www.qb64.net/ http://www.qb64.net/
- mabo 10y agoThanks for mentioning QB64. While I haven't tried it out (yet), having an integrated IDE and DOS emulation does sound pretty cool for nostalgia! Personally, many many years ago when I was fed up with QB's limitations, first versions of FreeBasic[1] were published and I made the switch. I haven't been following its development closely for some years now, but it seems the language has come a long way since then, e.g. supporting OO. It still can be told to behave QB-compatible, though. Maybe this is interesting for anyone looking for an open, more modern implementation of Basic. [1]: http://freebasic.net http://freebasic.net
- kyriakos 10y agoQbasic back then was a cut down version of Microsoft QuickBasic compiler. Wrote a lot of code in that.
- _ao789 10y agoTurbo pascal and borland c..
- S4M 10y agoYeah but those didn't come with the computers, you had to install them separately.
- userbinator 10y agoI don't remember there being any way (unless you count BAT files) to easily get started writing programs. The DEBUG utility would let you write small utilities in Asm, and PC magazines would publish source code listings in a format suitable for use with it --- the assembler had no labels so any address calculations needed to be done manually, but IMHO that just made it easier for people to see how "code" and "data" are really the same thing interpreted in different ways. It was limited to producing "flat binary" COM files up to 64K in size, but you quickly realise that when using Asm, 64K is a lot of code and a lot of interesting things can be done with far less; most of these utilities were in the hundreds of bytes to single-digit-kilobytes range. Compare that with today when a compiled "Hello world" binary in C is already larger than the majority of the utilities supplied with MS-DOS...
- _pmf_ 10y ago> unlike anything else installed on an average person's PC MS Office, Open Office both come with an embedded IDE.
- chii 10y agoVisual basic for applications (VBA) was really useful for making very basic stuff, like putting code into spreadsheets. Unfortunately you couldn't write a standalone program from it that has an independent ui. But as a high school student, it was good enough as a tool to by pass the security put on the school labs,e.g, you can launch programs on a CD ROM. I remember the fun times where bunch of friends were able to play age of empires LAN games, even though the computers were locked down.