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Lovely, it's like if LCARS and Pingus built a website together...but no complaints here, it brings back a lot of good memories! I took a deep dive into BASICs

Lovely, it's like if LCARS and Pingus built a website together...but no complaints here, it brings back a lot of good memories! I took a deep dive into BASICs earlier this year and came away with some unexpected results. In software, these stood out: - SmallBASIC ...not the Microsoft one. Wow this is quite an interesting set of tools, and I was impressed by ongoing developments. I started with it on my phone and continued on my other platforms since it worked so well. There are some faux-OOP convenience features even, like myfakeobject.value = 10 - QB64pe ...this really holds your hand and the documentation is great. - To-try: https://wonkey-coders.github.io/ https://wonkey-coders.github.io/ In discussions with developers, I was surprised to find some extremely intense, protective vibes. I'd consider "my BASIC == my childhood" a pretty reliable model. Simple how-to queries that would get ordinary answers in other languages sometimes brought out defensive responses. In group discussions there was also an interesting overlap between "strangely protective of my past" and "prefers writing BASIC" that came up over and over while I was trying to figure out the overall ecosystem of languages. For example, somebody wrote an algorithm example full of $ii $tk $zx and so on and I asked them about this (who knows, maybe there's some logical reason to not use my_variable_name for example) and the tone became very defensive, even insisting that maybe it was wrong but they are never going to change! Which didn't exactly have anything to do with what I was asking... In the various online forums there was frequently an ongoing argument over who left, for what reasons, where they ended up, and are you a member of that forum, and so on. Overall there was a surprising amount of interpersonal drama given its proportion to the active surface area of this language. And a lot of emotionality that just isn't as prominent in other communities I experienced, even though it's probably there at some level. Since I have spent a lot of professional time doing relationship work with techies, these things kind of reminded me of work pretty quick, and I found myself heading to some more modern languages just to get beyond the unaddressed, or unaddressable, feels-factor. Still, I look forward to coding some more in the future and particularly in trying out some of the newer tools I discovered.

grandiego 4y ago
> For example, somebody wrote an algorithm example full of $ii $tk $zx and so on and I asked them about this (who knows, maybe there's some logical reason to not use my_variable_name for example) The only Basic I used long ago was in C64 and AFAIR only the first two characters were significant; maybe the person was (unconsciously) trying to write some kind of "portable" code :)
the_af 4y ago
> In the various online forums there was frequently an ongoing argument over who left, for what reasons, where they ended up, and are you a member of that forum, and so on. In my experience, groups devoted to niche topics tend to have this sort of drama and discussions about who goes to which other forums, with rivalries between groups with similar interests, etc. Retro-anything communities in particular. Retro-anything also has the added flavor of "what they are doing these days is wrong, back then we would do $THING instead and it was so much better."

grandiego 4y ago

> For example, somebody wrote an algorithm example full of $ii $tk $zx and so on and I asked them about this (who knows, maybe there's some logical reason to not use my_variable_name for example) The only Basic I used long ago was in C64 and AFAIR only the first two characters were significant; maybe the person was (unconsciously) trying to write some kind of "portable" code :)

the_af 4y ago

> In the various online forums there was frequently an ongoing argument over who left, for what reasons, where they ended up, and are you a member of that forum, and so on. In my experience, groups devoted to niche topics tend to have this sort of drama and discussions about who goes to which other forums, with rivalries between groups with similar interests, etc. Retro-anything communities in particular. Retro-anything also has the added flavor of "what they are doing these days is wrong, back then we would do $THING instead and it was so much better."