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But you could learn BASIC, or Pascal, or C from one pretty thin book. And you could learn pretty much all of the language from that thin book. There was less
by AnimalMuppet 2y ago
But you could learn BASIC, or Pascal, or C from one pretty thin book. And you could learn pretty much all of the language from that thin book.
There was less to learn, and so you could learn it pretty thoroughly from more meager resources.
- pjmlp 2y agoThat was the easy part, coming up with algorithms, data structures (what is that?), and the actual hardware and OS mappings, was already beyond that book. Until I got hold of Input magazines collection, I was pretty much stuck with my Timex 2068 manual, and its set of demos. It is like learning a foreign language from a dictionary without anything else, until someone else shows the structure of the sentences.
- mypalmike 2y agoSo true. My first parser was for a little text adventure I wrote. I didn't know parsing was a thing people might write about, so I just muddled through some text manipulation in Atari BASIC it until it worked. Even sorting was something you just had to figure out - I managed to come up with bubble sort on my own, presumably like many others did in those days, unaware that sorting was well-trodden territory.