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Give me my procedures, conditionals, and loops, and I shall move mountains. Assembler (Prince of Persia): https://github.com/jmechner/Prince-of-Persia-Apple-II

• cr0sh 10y ago
  Regarding that second link: My career in software development started with BASIC - Pick BASIC to be exact. It was 1992, and I was 18 years old, had moved to Phoenix a week after graduating from high school to attend a local tech school (now defunct), and I needed something to pay the rent after having my hours cut as a cashier for Osco Drugs. Seeing my other classmates at the time taking "apprenticeship" positions doing electronics work, I decided to "cold-call" nearby companies, and landed on a "mom-n-pop" shop doing software development work. I put in my application, and they took a chance on me. They didn't hire me as a software developer, though - but as an "operator" - the guy to "run reports, keep paper in the printers, and mount tapes" for the actual programmers, to free up their time. I learned how to load a open-reel 9-track tape drive with vacuum columns at that place...something I have never used since. I was "in heaven" - being paid much more than I was as a cashier (but finding out much later that I was actually "underpaid" - oh, the ignorance of youth!), while doing less work! They gave me access to an account on their IBM RS6000 system running AIX - and one of the guys gave me a book on PICK BASIC to look over, and play around with. The shop developed "insurance claims management" software for the "Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System" (AHCCCS) - basically Arizona's form of Medicaid; this company's software managed claims (accounting, billing, etc). They used a form of PICK called "UniVerse": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system PICK (and UniVerse) were actually very interesting systems on their own; kinda a self-contained OS that integrated a programming language (BASIC) with a relational (and multi-value!) DB, along with other stuff. It compiled to a byte-code, which some manufacturers made CPUs to run (instead of interpreters); the idea was "portable software" across multiple architectures. Basically the idea of Java before Java. It worked out about as well, of course (because every implementation of PICK was just a bit different). Anyhow - the programming language used was BASIC - and my experience up to that point was writing bits and bobs of BASIC (plus some assembler - for the 6809 and 6502 processors - interestingly the latter was for the Apple IIe - CALL -151 was my friend; hand assembly of op-codes in the monitor - ugh). Well - they were monitoring the account, as I coded up adventure games and other diversions in PICK BASIC. The programmers and owner started feeding me with tasks ("hey, can you fix this issue" or "can you build this demo for the printer", etc) - and I proved myself. They hired me after I had graduated the tech school, and I've been here in Phoenix ever since. As far as BASIC and businesses are concerned - it is still used today, as much as everybody rants on it. Besides Visual Basic (large following there), PICK BASIC is still used (it has a legacy almost as long and broad as COBOL), and there are many other old "business BASICs" that existed and still have users today. I also know that there is at least one industrial robot arm manufacturer who sells a "Robot BASIC" to program and control their arms. ...and BASIC lives on today, of course - both closed and open-source variants. I'm more familiar with the various open-source BASICs. You have Gambas (which looks very much like VB), then there is QB64 (multi-platform 64 bit compiled QBASIC if you will), and also something called "BaCON", which is a "BASIC-to-C" converter (just the other day I was thinking taking it, and dumping out some Web Assembly code - essentially to see if I could get a BASIC program compiled to run in a web browser). There are also more than a few interpreters in javascript and other languages that can run BASIC code of some sort or another. Would I recommend it for new projects of large scope? Probably not, but I wouldn't outright discount it, either. I think it still has its place in the computing world, though that world is doing its best to ignore it in the hope that it is forgotten. It did teach some "bad habits" - but I think that a modern form of it, with proper OOP support, could be a very powerful teaching language for beginners - which is what it was always meant to be. It will always have a spot near and dear to my heart, at least.
  • jasim 10y ago
    Thanks for letting us into your lovely personal computing story. I often ruminate about the graveyard of dying software - the BASICs, the COBOLs, the xBases, the Delphis and the PowerBuilders, to name just the few I know. And the immense amount of code written and souls poured into by programmers over the years. They're all there, there is still juice in them, but we move on because, impermanence. This was also a theme in _why's parting gift. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5575707
• js8 10y ago
  > Give me my procedures, conditionals, and loops, and I shall move mountains. Isn't just MOV enough for "moving mountains"? https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/papers/mov.pdf https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sd601/papers/mov.pdf
  • AstralStorm 10y ago
    No. CNOT is enough (assuming it can access memory), not MOV.