Simple programming languages/ideas

AndyPix

You probly want to stay away from Object Orientated languages for a while if you are used to the way basic and Dos work ..


PHP is great fun and very useful for creating "funky stuff that does stuff and lives on the internet"
Obviously you would need to know some html for the user interface ..


I love C++ , but its not very friendly to start off with and you may find you get frustrated before it becomes fun, which may put you off.


Java may be on its way out, but its still good to learn and quite easy, and if you learn java you can also program apps for your phone (android)


Python is indeed trendy at the moment and would be useful to transfer into job skills.


Powershell is also fun too, and may be a bit of an easier step up from DOS stuff .


To sum up, i program in many (most) languages and I would say the most fun and rewarding ones are Java and PHP


Hope that helps a bit

Le_Kirk

Ah the old ZX and it's derivatives, those were the days. Waiting ages for a programme to load from cassette tape and just before it finished loading it backed out!! Tape stretch Bah! I remember learning BASIC and used to code for fun. My day job was writing code for PLC's (programmable logic controllers) that were used to control industrial equipment, so writing in BASIC was relaxing light entertainment. I remember writing code for a word processor and it worked!

esuhl

AndyPix wrote: »

You probly want to stay away from Object Orientated languages for a while if you are used to the way basic and Dos work ..

Oh, I haven't used BASIC or DOS since the early/mid 90s! I played with Java (and did a short course) 12 years ago, so I get the basics of object oriented programming. I wrote a calculator app for the coursework (so it was a very basic course).

And I spent a couple of years exclusively writing VBA code (in the days of Office 97) -- creating databases out of Excel spreadsheets and generating interactive Excel sheets from Access. It was a very weird brief. It should have been done entirely in Access, but (for reasons I never understood) all end-user interaction had to be in Excel... :-/

My favourite language was Visual Basic 6.0 because it was easy, yet fairly powerful/flexible (well... more so than VBA at least!): you could create standalone apps that would run on different systems. The IDEs in VBA/VB were amazing. Colour-coded syntax highlighting, autocompletion so you could see what properties of an object were available, etc. Before that, I was used to writing code in a text editor like vi or emacs (or on an old 8-bit computer)!

Then .NET came out and and... I just remember getting confused by the IDE and finding it really complicated. I don't think I could even figure out how to write a simple app.

The reason I've been looking at scripting languages recently is just because I needed to run some network tests and knew I could do it with a batch file... And then... I just remembered how much fun programming is and thought I should probably get back into it.

But things have moved on so much! Instead of opening Notepad, writing a few lines of code, and seeing "Hello world", you now have to use complicated IDEs, import a dozen libraries, and have hundreds of lines of code to do the same thing... (or so it seems).

I had a quick look at writing Android apps, but again, the learning curve seems quite steep. (Is this what other people feel when they try GNU/Linux?!)

I dunno... :-/

LHW99

Ever boot a PDP11 off punched tape

From what I remember PDP11's had two 1" wide reels and a row of small levers on the front. You switched on, and hit the levers in the right order and combination to boot the machine, and then one tape was the programme and one for data.

Fortran had punched cards at our Uni, and Algol60 had punched tape. Again with Algol you had to have two tapes, the programme and the data, and they both ran through the compiler in synch. If they got mismatched you got them both back with a "run error" note, and it was up to you to find out what the problem was!
BBC Basic / machine code was OK and did quite a lot of things in a simple manner that we still do in a much more complicated way now (databases, documents, charts and graphs). I started learning DOS and C, but didn't have any use so gave up. Has meant I've never been afraid to go beneath the surface in Windows though - and sometimes you do have to.

Cornucopia

esuhl wrote: »

My favourite language was Visual Basic 6.0 because it was easy, yet fairly powerful/flexible (well... more so than VBA at least!): you could create standalone apps that would run on different systems. The IDEs in VBA/VB were amazing. Colour-coded syntax highlighting, autocompletion so you could see what properties of an object were available, etc. Before that, I was used to writing code in a text editor like vi or emacs (or on an old 8-bit computer)!

I think many people look back on VB6.0 as a kind of golden era, when MS products were much simpler to work with than they are now. If you haven't got a free evaluation copy of the current MS offering, that's well worth a look.

But things have moved on so much! Instead of opening Notepad, writing a few lines of code, and seeing "Hello world", you now have to use complicated IDEs, import a dozen libraries, and have hundreds of lines of code to do the same thing... (or so it seems).

You can still use VBS natively on W10.

I had a quick look at writing Android apps, but again, the learning curve seems quite steep. (Is this what other people feel when they try GNU/Linux?!)

I dunno... :-/

I would say that Arduino is a less severe learning curve, especially if you already have some basic understanding of hardware. It is open-source for both hardware and software, and clone boards are available for a few pounds (cheapest when imported direct from China via eBay or AliExpress).

The development environment is a free download and the interface between the board and the PC is USB. There are dozens of cheap interface boards available and some more complicated variants with built-in Wifi and web servers, for when you are looking for something slightly more complex in the same family.

The development language is similar to C, and you can also code in assembly language.

forgotmyname

ChiefGrasscutter wrote: »

blimey...
Reading this most interesting thread tells me how times move on
There was I starting with Basic before moving to a bit of Pascal and then Fortran at University on ICL mainframes.
..and on to and engineering career of mega number crunching where Fortran was king.

No COBOL then?

Geodark

Depending on what you are wanting to do and where you are wanting your stuff to run (server side, client side, stand alone) there is always Javascript, node.js, angular.js etc using this stuff at work at the minute for WEB API based solutions, testing it with Mocha/jasmine and SoapUI. Really enjoying it.

coffeehound

I've recently come back to programming after 25 years due to having an idea for a mobile app. Currently supposed to be learning Apple xcode and their high-level language Swift 3, This latest revision has effectively moved Swift from being a C-type language where you have to manage the memory etc yourself, to a user-friendly one where such things are taken care of for you. It's free to download and use xcode but there is a modest fee if you want to take your app to market. Glad to read this thread as it has reminded me to get back to it...

ARandomMiser

forgotmyname wrote: »

No COBOL then?

I used to love COBOL, but then again as a young assembler programmer I worked for the company that developed a COBOL compiler.

Real programmers use assembler

forgotmyname

eww assembler.. nooo

I think i still have my Commodore VIC20 Vixen assembler cartridge

Or was Vixen the RAM pack and the assembler cart something else? I have them somwehere.

Peeking and Poking.. boring