3 ms·

My guess is the lack of income from providing this information from a browser vendor (who are all mostly Chromium based, so there's no reason to offer anything

My guess is the lack of income from providing this information from a browser vendor (who are all mostly Chromium based, so there's no reason to offer anything that makes it easier to use their specific browser), and the number of companies that have popped up offering to sell you tutorials on web development. I am in my almost mid-40's, so I got to watch the web grow, and have my skills grow with it. Reading uncompressed source code from libraries like PrototypeJS/Scriptaculous, and early jQuery, along with the custom code per website, definitely made me the developer I am today (in regards to web development, although desktop tools have definitely gotten better, as well).

WorldMaker 3y ago
Most of the people writing "BASIC Zines" weren't BASIC vendors. Some were code-inspired journalists doing it for "real" magazines that wanted "hip" computer content. (The brief period where BASIC was hip computing content was brief.) Some were "hackers" of various sorts doing it for fun and maybe a quick dollar, cheaply photocopied, pamphlet style for the cheapest racks in book stores or software stores (remember those?) or viral distribution in schools. I'm sure most of the original Zines didn't make that much income. It was thought that the latter sorts of "cool hackers" sending photocopied pamphlets to schools or book stores (or software stores) stopped doing it as much when BASIC stopped being the "operating system" of home computers (the Commodore 64 was one of many that booted directly to a BASIC REPL; the early IBM PCs either booted to BASIC or had a BASIC interpreter close to hand) and BASIC interpreters stopped being "everywhere". Now the web browser is the modern OS and Dev Tools are ubiquitous and a single button press away (almost universally F12). JS REPLs are right there for immediate use and ES2020+ is the friendliest JS has ever been. I think all we're missing are the "hacker teachers" with the right punk attitudes, an access to a Xerox, and the right sort of store willing to sell home made zip lock bags full of photocopies again. (Or I don't know, a cheap webpage could be cool too. Make it Geocities-esque with lots of classic Under Construction GIFs and encourage people to fork it and construct it themself.)
- progmetaldev 3y ago
  I got my start on an Atari 800XE with Atari BASIC, and still wish there was a place for that type of computing in current society.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Most of the people writing "BASIC Zines" weren't BASIC vendors. Some were code-inspired journalists doing it for "real" magazines that wanted "hip" computer content. (The brief period where BASIC was hip computing content was brief.) Some were "hackers" of various sorts doing it for fun and maybe a quick dollar, cheaply photocopied, pamphlet style for the cheapest racks in book stores or software stores (remember those?) or viral distribution in schools. I'm sure most of the original Zines didn't make that much income. It was thought that the latter sorts of "cool hackers" sending photocopied pamphlets to schools or book stores (or software stores) stopped doing it as much when BASIC stopped being the "operating system" of home computers (the Commodore 64 was one of many that booted directly to a BASIC REPL; the early IBM PCs either booted to BASIC or had a BASIC interpreter close to hand) and BASIC interpreters stopped being "everywhere". Now the web browser is the modern OS and Dev Tools are ubiquitous and a single button press away (almost universally F12). JS REPLs are right there for immediate use and ES2020+ is the friendliest JS has ever been. I think all we're missing are the "hacker teachers" with the right punk attitudes, an access to a Xerox, and the right sort of store willing to sell home made zip lock bags full of photocopies again. (Or I don't know, a cheap webpage could be cool too. Make it Geocities-esque with lots of classic Under Construction GIFs and encourage people to fork it and construct it themself.)

progmetaldev 3y ago
I got my start on an Atari 800XE with Atari BASIC, and still wish there was a place for that type of computing in current society.