ProgrammerHumor
makeBasicGreatAgain
Discussion
Today we miss the excitement of typing in a bunch of numbers into a DATA statement making sure that you saved it to cassette tape with the hope that you didn't make any typos and crash your PC with 8k of RAM.
8k RAM? Pure luxury! My first home computer had 1.5k and I had to program my favourite games again every day because I could not afford a cassette player.
That thought me a lot about efficient resource management, though :-)
I checked out Dave Ahl's BASIC games book from the library and carried it with me every day to Radio Shack to type them in on the TRS-80, knowing that the game would be erased minutes after I walked away from the demo model.
Ended up buying the Commodore PET instead. Man, those were the days.
Oh! And I just remembered the first time I crashed the PET using too much memory: I got it into my head to write a Monopoly game, and just filling out the 40-element array with property descriptions was more than it could handle.
Also also: Obligatory Monty Python - We used to dream of living in a cardboard box.
Wow, that takes me back! I learned PEEK and POKE from - of all places - the Foley's department store where they were selling the Commodore PET and the sales geek actually learned how to use it so he could teach me before I bought it. I wrote a primitive animation by using POKE to write a set of ASCII characters directly to screen memory, replace them with blanks, and move over one column.
8,192 bytes, kids. That's all I had to work with. And I saved my programs to the builtin cassette tape recorder.
And we liked it that way, because it was a technological miracle.
Oh, that's neat. I like that. My next piece of software for my employer will be full of it. And docuwhats.
If a field just has the simplest setter and getter, just make it public
i used to despise getters and setters but now i love them because you can ensure the variable is always valid
I wrote a routine to allow examination of memory within a server process, so obviously the function was called PEEK. But you couldn’t modify that memory, so the corresponding POKE function just responded with the message “Oww, that hurt”.
Accessors and mutators