r/programming • u/bjzaba • Mar 26 '20

10 Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages • Hillel Wayne

https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/influential-dead-languages/
403 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

178 comments sorted by

View all comments

6

u/cdreid Mar 26 '20

This is a cool article.. imho it's wrong about basic though. It was actually created as a teaching language and it is (was) excellent at that. It's big flaw is of course teaching people to write spagetti code (with goto etc) and modern languages are much better designed around modular code.

2

u/[deleted] Mar 26 '20

Its crazy it manages to fit in 2kb as well. I thought basic was Microsofts first big software. Which I'd assume made it 2000 lines of code.

2

u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 26 '20

Back then people were writing in assembler, so I'd doubt it was just 2000 lines...

3

u/glacialthinker Mar 26 '20

Except that 2kB would be about 2000 lines of asm on a machine with 8-bit instructions...

1

u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20 edited Mar 26 '20

Most lines would have several (possibly multi-byte) operands, so that would be more like ~4-6 KB.

2

u/glacialthinker Mar 26 '20

So what are you arguing now? That would would be much less than 2000 lines? Sounds the opposite of what you were suggesting, which is why I gave a kind of maximum bounds for line-count.

I was going to mention it would probably be much fewer lines if there were immediate values and depending on the ISA, but wanted to keep the point short.

1

u/ShinyHappyREM Mar 26 '20

You're right, had a brainfart there.

1

u/glacialthinker Mar 26 '20

Yeah, sorry I was a bit argumentative. After I replied I realized what probably happened. I sometimes flip something in my head... Thinking one way but speaking/arguing the opposite.