Survey - what language are you coming from?

[Georg Wrede]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Pragma wrote:
> 
>> I cut my teeth on C64 Basic
> 
>> (*I see that I'm not alone here - it's like those things were built to 
>> train new coders)
> 
> I remember being so excited when the C64 magazines arrived in the 
> mail--a friend and I would spend all day entering the printed code to 
> play the new game they contained.  It wasn't my first experience with 
> programming, but it was certainly one of the most significant.

Oh, the days!

To date, my biggest computing mistake was to not buy the C64. I had 
bought the VIC-20, and the 64 came out about a month later. I was always 
waiting for the follower to the 64, which "never" came. (The 128, years 
later never proved to be a real successor.)

At the time I had two worries: the (Microsoft!!!!) basic on the VIC was 
pretty arcane, no named subroutines with parameters, no proper 
renumbering of program lines, not to speak of switch statements and the 
like. The second worry was, I grew increasingly aware of the need of a 
formal, academic education in programming. For example, I had read 
several texts on programming where Recursion was mentioned. But, in all 
of them the only real example of recursion was the Fibonacci numbers. 
Not very real-world connected. Stuff like linked lists, priority queues, 
  unrolling versus compiling, were not familiar despite vigorous efforts.

My biggest personal feat (IMHO) was when I found an issue of the German 
CHIP magazine on the newsstand, and it boasted a "relocatable machine 
code monitor for the C64". They explicitly said it won't work on the 
VIC-24: too little memory, problems with address space, and of course a 
different CPU.

Earlier I had bought a 16k extension RAM card, mail order from Germany, 
but the magazine declared I still couldn't use the program on my VIC.

(OT: Heh, at the time, one couldn't buy a modem in Germany. They were 
considered "militarily dubious", or some such, so Germany became the 
last country in Europe to become "networked". Of course, 15 years later, 
the Internet simply flooded the continent.)

I think I stood some 2 hours at the magazine shelf in the bookstore, and 
finally decided "it is doable".

The program listing was some 8 spreads of tightly typed decimal 
bytecodes, with an error check code at the end of each line. I had to 
invent my own input routine because the logic of the C64 routine was 
dependent "on the length of the self-modifying-code input buffer" or 
some such (sorry, don't remember the exact details off-hand anymore).

Having entered half of the program, I had to save it to cassette tape (I 
too was too poor to afford a Floppy Drive). Then I entered the other 
half, saved it on the cassette tape, then I figured out a way to load 
each half into the same session, and then save them both together on a 
separate tape cassette.

Off hand I don't remeber too many times I've seriously been as proud of 
myself as  when I got the machine code monitor to actually work on my 
VIC-24 when it really wasn't supposed to be possible. Man, if I could 
relive that feeling again!!