Iian Neill wrote: > Although there are plenty of blogs and forums on programming out there, it's > really sad that there isn't some mass medium for programming literacy -- and > I suspect that a big part of it is that, despite its many documented flaws, > BASIC > at least had a small and graspable vocabulary that didn't require any header > files, libraries, drivers, compilers, IDEs, or profiling tools.
The Sinclair machines even took advantage of BASIC's limited and fixed vocabulary to work around their bad keyboards by putting one keyword per key and having a mode based input system. This eliminated many cases of typing expressions with bad syntax, which was really helpful for beginners. The tile based syntax of Scratch and Etoys is a modern way of getting the same effect. I totally agree with you about magazines and books still being needed in this age of blogs, which is why I am really glad that the magazine for the Raspberry Pi has reached its third issue already with some interesting listings for the users to type into their machines: http://www.themagpi.com/ The first books about the machine is about to come out (I am sure there will be others): http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/111846446X/ The idea of a computer with Logo in ROM instead of BASIC was mentioned in this thread. I did build such a machine in 1983, but it was never released commercially, unfortunately: http://www.merlintec.com/lsi/pegasus.html There were four implementations of Logo for the BBC Micro which were supplied as ROMs, so that machine should probably count: http://www.nostalgia8.nl/logo/docs/mudeel1.jpg http://www.nostalgia8.nl/logo/docs/mudeel2.jpg http://www.nostalgia8.nl/logo/docs/mudeel3.jpg http://www.nostalgia8.nl/logo/docs/mudeel4.jpg This Soviet clone of the Sinclair Spectrum added the following ROM "modes": CP/M, Forth and Logo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_%28computer%29 -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
