ProgrammingI want to have a simple programming language ! !The art of programming has gone to wrong trails !When the computers were new, they were used to solve problems. We were able to solve mathematical and logical problems by writing programs and running them. The problems were mostly very simple. You could want to go thru a file and change every "this" to "that" or you wanted to calculate polynome "Y = 2*X^3 + 5*X^2 + 7.3*^ + 4.8" and get a simple list of values or even a simple graph to see how the polynome behaves. Possibly you wanted to connect a self made device to your PC and command it to make some funny light show. Most of the tasks were 'one time only', meaning that you just wanted to have the answers one time. The speed of the program didn't mean anything as didn't the visual aspects of the program. Most of the time spent to the project went to the thinking and the PC was only a calculator to help your work, to get some simple ansvers. You had a choice of programming languages. The most valuable for a mathemathic
or logical problem were Fortran, Pascal and Basic. They had all the tools
needed. They were simple enough so that if you could talk English, you could
write your first program in about one hour after you had bought your first
computer. ( I myself had my first self written game running one hour after I
had my first computer on my desk ). Fortran was originally meant for the mathematicists anf physicists to solve mathemathical problems. Originally it had no way to give graphical plots, but there were ways for that too. Pascal was another tool for mathematical problems, but it had more finesses Basic was meant to be a simple programming tool for everything. Besides the tools found in Fortran, it included some commands to handle character strings. In those good old days you allways found articles in newspapers telling you how
awfull those languages were. They were not modular and structured and they
didnt have real subprograms. You were told that they teach you bad habits in
programming and they teach you make spaghetti code because they had the
dredfull command "GO". There was even versions of Basic, where you had true subprograms, structured and modular programming environment. Still you could write programs without using them. The last of them was Microsoft QuickBasic 4.5. And the whole packet fitted to four diskettes. Compiling programs In QuicBasic you wrote the code and ran it. It was ran as so called P-code that
was partially compiled but not optimized. When the code was OK, you compiled it
and it ran about 10 times faster than the original P-code. The test gave another interesting result: the new version of QuickBasic was slover than the original ! C, C+, C++, C# were for the real men writing operating systems. They are
awfull, if you want to make something simple. The big question : WHY ?! For men writing simple programs once a week there doesn't seem to be tools ! I got a free version of Microsoft Visual Basic a week ago. I made a small
installation leaving out the SQL-part. The packet needed a whooping 1.1 GB
(1100MB) of real estate. (You remember VIC-20 with 16kb of system and 3.5 kB of
RAM ;) - find a directory full of files endig ".XYZ" I have written this kind of programs in about every known and some exotic
languages. I have even used older versions of VisualBasic. After about three hours I closed the VisualBasic, started QuickBasic 4.5. It took me about 10 minutes to write the program including the testing. I made a compiled packet of the program, sent it to the customer via email and went to bed. |