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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 09:44 AM

  I understand what you are saying...

  I have written tens of thousands of lines of BASIC code on everything from a UNIVAC 1108 to an Apple II and I am rather fond of the language. Over about the last 10 years I noticed that programming was getting less and less fun. I was spending all my time looking up objects in the documentation instead of writing code.

  This lead me to the realization that when I used to program in BASIC everything was built into the language. One manual, one interface, one way of doing things. Simple things were simple to do and hard things were proportionally harder. The languages I use today have almost nothing built into the language. Even printing a simple line of text requires that I #include the correct library and learn the ins and outs of the IO library. What ever happend to

  PRINT I, J

  And it spreads into other areas as well. In the bad old days I would code a quick BASIC script to do a financial calulation. Now, I have to use a spread sheet, or spend too long coding it up in Java or C++.

  Of course, the problem is that you have to add a *LOT* to a language to be able to write modern applications. And the market for programming languages (even free ones) is for application developers, not kids. I have spent a few hours a week over the last three years playing with designs for a language aimed to solve this problem. I want to make programming fun again. I want to make it usable by kids and adults. Will I ever do it? Maybe. :-)

  I do have one question for you, why are you so intent on line oriented languages? My experience is that forcing a language to match up with lines of text causes a lot of confusion. There always has to be a way to cross a line boundry. So, I was surprised by you focus on that type of language. On the other hand I am an old fart and computers were mostly science fiction when I was in junior high. (Oh, the existed, but no one had one. They cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars back then.) I do teach game programming so I thought I was in touch with the youth point of view on this subject.

  Bob Pendleton

  P.S.

  I've loved your writing ever since I first saw you in Analog. Looking forward to anything you write.

  —Bob Pendleton
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