I just knew I'd offend somebody with that...
Atheist wrote:
Amos Pro and basics of other stripes (and compilers for them) are still needed, for the rest of us mere mortals. I can't defend Amos' incapability to run on certain HW combinations. I wish it wasn't the case, but I know how to use it. That means a lot to me, as well as others. We just can't understand C, or assembler, try as we might.
I know and I sympathise. C can look quite daunting, certianly moreso than basic languages. With basic you are used to having a lot of nice commands that do something specific. With C you get about, what, 20 keywords, a bunch of syntax, everything else handled through functions (which unline basic don't differentiate between subroutines and procedures),
headaches with compilers and a bunch of other stuff to worry about. I won't even go into asm :-)
For me, the C thing started out as a single minded determination not to be defeated by it. Back then I felt as you do about it now. Years on and you appreciate that it is truly in a league of it's own (which is why so many languages borrowed the syntax).
I didn't feel like posting this, as I have NO REASON to believe you could possibly be against MORE people trying to write computer software.
Your'e right, I wanna see more and more people programming, especially on their amigas ;-)
Just felt a bit depressed when I keep hearing people laugh at basics, because, that's as far as I could get, and I feel left out.
Come on dude, don't take it personally. I didn't say "Basic", nor do I deride it. I might not like it but VisualBasic is used in industry a great deal, especially when fast turn around times are important. I know some people do snigger at Basic in general but my gripe is with AMOS in particular.
To reiterate, AMOS got a lot of people into programming and that's a good thing. As you know I'm a C/C++ (ant a bit of asm) man myself but I also worked a lot with Blitz back in the day, and AMOS itself prior to that (which is where the bad opinion developed).
My gripe with amos is that it was so system unfriendly that if a guy spends ages writing the perfect utility, it probably won't run on other configs and as such his effort is (to a degree) wasted.
You'd be more depressed if you wrote the next greatest thing in AMOS and nobody could use it, right?
Your'e probably marginally better off with Blitz - I was. Many blitz programs still work OK on my machine even now and there are plenty of libraries for it that give you RTG and what not. As for AMOS, even the IntOS stuff tends to fall over on my machine 8 times out of 10.
It's clear to me that there is a market for an easy to use basic-like OOP language (with full support for RTG etc) for amiga. I wonder how Python is coming along...
