From the open newslist, I’ve been asked to reflect on the 50th anniversary of BASIC.
This came at the same time I read this post on the Light Table blog. I think Jamie Brandon has a point about the distinction between an evaluate-or-die and an edit-and-continue model of computing. He’s also right about the deployment gap – it’s often much harder to deploy code in a useful manner than it is to develop it, especially if it’s not your job. For example, one of the reasons why the Web is so important is that it gets around having to get your app onto all 15 PCs at work that nobody really manages.
Deployment is important because it is the way in which your good idea can actually affect anyone else. The Time piece quotes the current chair of maths at Dartmouth, where BASIC was invented, as saying:
you need some immediacy in the turnaround
He’s talking about debugging, but the two issues are the same thing at different levels of analysis. You run it and debug it on your machine, you deploy it and improve it. When I’ve done things like this, I’ve always used the work BSD server just because I can ssh into it, write python, and well, that’s it.
Working with Symbian was the absolute opposite; the sheer embuggerance of getting to the point where you could even try, and getting back there once you changed anything, was desperate. I never realised why anyone cared about iPhones, in the era when they had crappy radios and no copy-and-paste, until I tried to make an app for S60.
Fortunately, this ought to be the easiest problem to solve in these cloudy days.
On the other hand, I’ve got to stand up for language. Graphical programming tools are usually awful, for two reasons. First of all, they mix aesthetic and logical decisions. Second, language is wonderful, and deeply universal, and text is language. Expressing yourself graphically to the extent you can in speech or writing is a whole other craft. Blogging didn’t happen because the software did the writing for you; it happened because it distributed it.
BASIC itself? Well, I was a BASIC kid. I had a ZX Spectrum and I used to take the handbook to bed and read it under the covers. I remember talking in BASIC with Matty Stockham on the school bus. In many ways the Spectrum-BASIC combo was the ultimate middle-class artefact; somehow educational, totally useless, and rather less fun than it was meant to be unless you’re like me. If the Early Learning Centre had been able to develop a computer, that’s what they would have done. Is it telling in the light of what I’ve just said that the BBC Micro had much better networking support?
But this is beside the point. The point wasn’t that I became a programmer – in fact, I rebelled against computers and the computer geek stereotype to the extent of refusing to have an e-mail address, and as a result I missed out on the A-level computing course Eben Upton took a year ahead of me – it was education in the classic sense. I learned that the digital environment, springing up all around, was one I could understand, criticise, and influence.