Well, maybe I can just go back to basic, now that THIS made breaking news!!!
C’mon, c’mon! Who is going to be the first one to submit a pull request for gw-basic!?! It would be hilarious to see someone’s face when a bug report gets put in. 
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I had a disassembled version of the C64 BASIC interpreter back in the 80s. Was a bit beyond my pre-college skills to fully understand how it worked, but I loved the concept of encoded tokens and pointers forming a linked list for how the source was stored in memory 
I might well take a look at this code, thanks. I’m assuming it’s in assembler, though if we’re lucky, it might be in C Thanks for that, much appreciated 
I love how line six-hundered-something of the ‘main’ program strictly denies ‘funny business.’ (Whatever that may entail.) HAHA! It’s pretty well documented code, and while I don’t understand the majority of it, the comments are very fun to read. Have a look at what some pretty talented young programmers put together back in the Dos 3.3 days.
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I started having a browse, and of course was correct in suspecting it was written in assembler. The kind of tricks that had to be performed with the limited architectures in those days… Yes I do think programmers had to be very, very clever, though the emphasis now tends to be on problems of a different sort. I also found the comments quite funny. Besides still being somewhat interested in assembly programming, interesting to see heavy use of macros and how I’m guessing they influenced function design in C, which was to basically become a portable high-level assembler of sorts, and it still is!
I am not a huge programmer myself. I do some scripting in BASH at work but only by necessity. I sort of want to move into python more but just have not taken the time to dive into it. I have played around in Powershell but not a fan. I also had some actual course work many years ago in TurboPascal 7.0 but it was archaic and I was around 15 when I was in the class so did not get much out of it beyond the understanding of concepts.
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I’ve recently started learning Ruby and I’m loving it. Very surprised, actually. Java has been my favourite language since… mid-late 90s, I’d say. If Ruby had a reliable, portable GUI toolkit, it might become my new favourite!
Even though I barely use it, I would say Ruby is my favorite and that’s coming from a guy who prefers languages with strong typing. Ruby code can look beautiful if you know how to write it well. C comes 2nd on my list.
edit: The language I probably dislike the most is PHP. Yes, it’s definitely cliche but I speak from experience. I use it at my current work and I just don’t like some weird early design decisions in the language. It’s riddled with a lot of inconsistencies. The language is improving though. PHP 8 seems to fix some of the inconsistencies but we’re stuck with 7 at work.
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In some ways Ruby reminds me more of C than anything else I’ve ever coded in, though it brings back some memories of Smalltalk and Perl too. The reason I say that is because it seems to share something of C’s permissive philosophy, unless I’m reading this incorrectly. What some folks might find liberating - the compiler / interpreter staying out of the way - some might argue is asking for trouble. There’s something just “right” about Ruby making things easier for the programmer, in my opinion. I use Java out of convenience, because the standard libraries cover just about every need, but my, does one have jump through convoluted hoops to get it to do what you want. And the kludge with which lambdas are implemented, my, oh my!
If I needed to get something even basic up and running, in the past I’d default to Java because I knew I’d have everything I needed available - within reason - but if I get to know Ruby’s standard classes and find they’re adequate, I might well switch to it for basic needs.
Today I’ve been trying to find out about JRuby. That would tie Ruby to Swing or other Java GUI toolkits. If it’s too much hassle though, I’ll happily use C-Ruby with Tk at least for prototyping.
I also find its support for documentation and testing, packaging etc. pretty well-thought-out and its community seems very friendly. Yup. I could find a home here, I’m thinking!
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I recently saw an example of “the game of life” written as an APL one liner and thought “woah, that is phenomenal” but when you look at the keyboard and the character set you will cry. It’s one of those languages that’s good for all the right reasons and wrong in all the most annoying ways.
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When I first learnt Perl in the mid-90s when it was becoming wildly popular, I thought some of its advantages were awesome, but its syntax … write only as they say, lol! I think it was Perl that inspired a lot of the scripting languages that have followed, though just as I didn’t really ever use Perl for anything but small file-processing needs, I never really considered scripting languages for building larger systems. I guess it comes down to need. I am continuing to find I enjoy Ruby.
If APL is that expressive, though I don’t know it at all, I wonder if it has a “write only” style too, in the way of Perl?
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I’ve tried throughout the years to learn programming, but it has never worked out for me. Maybe it’s because english isn’t my native language, maybe my brain is wired differently. I tried html, java, css, python, C#, even looked at rust, but never got any real progress…
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I think it depends on what you wish to do with the language when you’ve learned it. I think the keywords all being in English is probably a factor. Ruby is simple but flexible and expressive. There’s are some starter-tutorials online too, if you’re curious. Another thing about Ruby is it’s open source and very, very community oriented
The link above takes you to a fun website where you can try-out the language in a browser, without even installing it!
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I miss the power of Perl, but I don’t miss having to remember all of the little hidden nuances of Perl.
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Perl was like a super-powered bash - also the O’Reilly intros to the language were hilarious. I think it’s use has gone into decline now but like bash, it probably still has its uses, I guess. I wonder what you use instead of it for tasks you would have used it for in the past?
I moved, kicking and screaming, over the Python, which is what I use now.
There are some things I like better about Python, but there are some things I liked better about Perl.
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I program/develop in c# for my job as a web developer. So html, css, tsql and JavaScript are among my other tools. I’ve used plenty of other languages and scripts but these are the most relevant to me. I’ll never code anything for Linux though, at 1700 each day I am coding free. Maybe when I retire.
I haven’t used Python much, though I did think it had a far more … erm… manageable syntax than Perl - from a readability perspective. I couldn’t really see any benefits in it for general purpose programming compared to Java, though as a Perl replacement in some ways I could see it as useful. What surprises me is just how popular Python has now become. Maybe I’ll take another look at it at some stage, though Ruby really does have be mesmerised at the moment.
I did look a little at C# some years ago, though what put me off about it then was that it seemed like almost a re-implementation of Java but for Microsoft’s .NET only. I can’t remember at that time how complete a port of any equivalent was for Linux. I’d rather avoid lock-in to the greatest extent possible, though in the workplace I agree MS can be hard to escape and we do all need to pay the bills.
I’m no coder but I dabble in Bash, and now in the Fish shell.
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I don’t know APL or Perl well enough to know. APL was designed to do matrix calculations as far as I understand. It’s a pretty neat part of computer history. I was at a clients house whose whole office was filled with programming books and one of them was an APL book from the 60s. I can’t wait for that garage sale.
Still in use today. Best way to simulate multidimensional arrays "objects" in BASH? Here perl was a stepping stone in the early days before a fully POSIX compliant solution was found.
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