In this day and age most coders won't get out of bed unless there's a syntax-highlighting intellisense-enabled, bracket-matching, library-aware, compiler-linked IDE to use. It's a far cry from the old days when all you had was a keyboard..... yeah, not even an editor... you just turned the machine on and bam! you were at the coding prompt.
Going back to BASICs (pun intended) has been a real palette cleanser for me over the last few months. I've been working on a book project since August off and on (mainly off), but what started as a small scan-and-spellcheck became a full-on writing project. Once I started to dig into the old code that needed checking I began to see many little issues here and there, so I cleaned them up and prepared a "fixed" version of the code....
Then the collaborators asked the intended audience what they'd like, and the response was "more... and better".... So, in January I went back and had another wash through the code to bring it up to date, and apply all the tricks and tips from 40 years of advancement... The result was.... exhausting... Trying to fit expanded stuff into a really tight space (under 8k) has been a real challenge....
And it's been WONDERFUL. I put my BASIC programming on hiatus in the early 1990s. I was an active Speccy user until about 1989, and then I had GWBASIC on the PC until about 1992... But then I went to uni and they were a bit snobbish about BASIC, so I had to transition from BASIC, Pascal and Forth over to C.... C's alright, but after having been in the safe harbour of BASIC and the lovely warm shallows of Pascal, C felt like I'd been thrown into the storm-tossed Atlantic with some planks of wood and a compass.
Ever since then I've just used C/C++ up until Visual Basic.. then faffed with that, but jumped away to Java and C# as soon as I could (VB always gave me the heebie-jeebies.. I don't know why.. There was just a sense of 'wrongness' about it.... Like someone had given me some lego and a flick-knife... The lego's great.. but the flick-knife... dangerous... and out of place....
I digress... Anyhoo, apart from some wild dabbling with Perl again during my PhD and then days working for a small IT company, I've stuck to C#.... But... something inside me always wanted to go back to my roots...
I backed the Kickstarter for the Spectrum Next (part deux)... I was having kids around the time of KS1, so didn't have the cash to spare.... but I backed the KS2.... I've kept it out on the desk, and played around with it a little... made some little programs, and kept my BASIC skills vaguely sharpened.... but I've not really focussed on it..... until now!
Getting back into Speccy BASIC brought it all back... It's such a wonderful little dialect.. There's so much to get your teeth into if you like to experiment.. Things which shouldn't work, do.. Things which should work, don't. And there's enough "cool tricks" to fill about 20 pages of book. I should know, I just listed all the best ones out!
Actually being able to splurge 40 years of experience with BASIC into one solid block has been really liberating, actually. I wouldn't claim to being the best BASIC coder on the planet, but I had no idea I had so much arcane trickery stored in my brain until I started typing it all in. At first I thought I'd maybe write a page or more... But after I passed 10 pages and the tricks were still coming thick and fast I realised why I loved Spectrum BASIC so much: It's just pure fun to poke it with a sharp stick!
Were most languages will bitch at you if you put so much as a semicolon out of place, BASIC is just rife with ways to trick it into doing stuff it was never meant to. I'll write some more next time... I'm sleepy :)