- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Reading the first page, I thought "Chipmunk BASIC". I had a ripper a few years ago when I discovered it. Good stuff, back to the old interpreted days. There is a point to the instant feedback nature of interpreted programming, but there are many other environments to get that in. But that wasn't enough for Brin, he wanted the plain screen and the instant on I guess, with no trappings of GUI. I think that he wanted something aesthetic rather than something purposeful.
When I learned programming, I learned on computers, calculators, and by hand (really, going through your own code when you don't have a computer to check it is useful). I was also a language addict, and tried BASIC, pascal, Fortran, Lisp, Forth, etc. I see shades of each of these in current, higher level languages that I use. It is trivial to grab installs of any and all of these and learn, or grab a TI calculator to do simple programming on. Calling these "rationalizations" because we don't share Brin's aesthetic sense is insulting and trite.
