From: "Michael W. Ryder" <_mwryder@...> Date: 2007-01-04T17:40:13+09:00 Subject: Re: Fun languages (was Re: Status of Cardinal (was Re: Proposal to create a new mailing list)) M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: > Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote: >> Hi, >> >> In message "Re: Fun languages (was Re: Status of Cardinal (was Re: >> Proposal to create a new mailing list))" >> on Thu, 4 Jan 2007 00:46:11 +0900, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" >> writes: >> >> |Someone (Dave Thomas? Andy Hunt? DHH?) said that Ruby made >> programming |fun *again*. So the obvious question is, "What languages >> were fun before |there was Ruby?" >> >> BASIC was fun for me, when I was in junior high. The point is that as >> I grow up, the problem domain I am in charge become far more complex >> than BASIC can handle. That's why I need Ruby. >> >> matz. >> >> >> > BASIC was *never* fun for me. I was in grad school when it came out, and > by then I had extensive FORTRAN and macro assembler experience and was > fooling around with Lisp 1.5. I simply can't imagine the people who > bought Altairs and spent *hours* reading Microsoft BASIC into the 8K of > RAM from an ASR 33. :) > I have used Business Basic (a superset of Basic) professionally for over 20 years and like a lot of things about it. I love having screen and file handling built into the language. It makes it very easy to write programs, no having to worry about requiring files or linking. And debugging is even easier as I can stop a program at any point see what is going on, fix it, and continue. I started with Fortran on IBM and CDC mainframes but the language needed a lot of help to be user friendly or debugging. I spent over a week debugging a Fortran program that baffled even the heads of the computer department before finding out my problem was that I requested too much memory!