lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu.rutgers.edu (Louie Crew) (08/01/90)
>If you are writing programs >for commercial sale you shouldn't be using BASIC. If not you still shouldn't >be using BASIC for anything but quick and dirty stuff. If you feel you must >use BASIC then you shouldn't be protecting them but rather let others see the >actual code. >D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid) | I continue to make several thousand dollars a year on shareware programs that I have written in BASIC, and I laugh at this kind of elitism all the way to the bank. I am an English professor and I use spaghetti code to write programs more complicated and more useful than those of most computer science graduates who pontificate these linguistic prejudices. I once won "Best Article of the Year" from the Hong Kong Computer Society (the professional group of people who run the computers in the world's third largest banking center and at one of the world's most complex airports) in recognition for an article that I wrote about programming in a language simpler yet than even BASIC, namely in WordStar 3.3's MailMerge, which I enslaved to teach me Cantonese. Good programs derive from imagination far more than from mindless mastery of codes. My style-checker is extremely popular with professional journalists not because I can get the lightning speed of some of the competition, but because my program monitors what good writers really care enough about monitoring. My program that manages writers' circulation of manuscripts is used by several hundred writers, at least two of them among the most published poets of our time. I have even turned over the code to a computer science class or two just so they could laugh at it, and still eat humble pie, cause honey, they would have to have as many hundreds of publications as I have (MUSES tells me today that it is at 764) before they would begin to imagine all the bells and whistles that writers welcome in a good program. Of course I would like to have a version of my program in assembler or some other more powerful code, but for now I settle for the ever newer and faster chips that keep it trucking and keep those who use my program from the drudgery that used to plague their circulation and bookkeeping. I'm also delighted when I snoop at many other *.EXE programs and discover that others with programs that do good things have used BASIC source code. Yes, if I were starting afresh, I would use C or Pascal, but I am not starting afresh, and I dare some "experts" to catch up. I had the same problem in learning Cantonese. When I had a vocabulary of 10 words I was into the streets talking to real people and learning rapidly and naturally. Some of my colleagues who were afraid to say Neehow (hello) until no one had laughed at them, studied the language for three years before they gave up and still sit in their gweilo (white ghost) apartments talking English only. The ideal would be to have programmers and users collaborate, but I find most programmers much too arrogant to consider that, and most users too illiterate about binary approaches to be able to identify what can actually be put into on/off logic. At Chinese University several of my colleagues in computer science used to send their senior students to play by me ideas for their senior projects. Of course I advocated innovative projects in the humanities, but I could well see why most opted for yet on more office management program, or a new file management program: they were safer and not subject to the caprice of "humanists" so ill educated as to tell a machine, merely: "Tell me whether that sentence is right or wrong." ============================================================================ ===== Louie Crew: lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu ==== ===== CompuServe No. 73517,147. FAX 201-648-5700 Attn. Conklin #156 ==== ===== Rutgers/Newark, NJ 07102 201-485-4503 h; 201-648-5434 o ==== ===== or ==== ===== Box 30, Newark, NJ 07101 ==== ============================================================================
robert@ireq.hydro.qc.ca (R.Meunier 8516) (08/01/90)
In article <Jul.31.23.14.44.1990.19677@galaxy.rutgers.edu> lcrew@andromeda.rutgers.edu.UUCP (Louie Crew) writes: >>If you are writing programs >>for commercial sale you shouldn't be using BASIC. If not you still shouldn't >>be using BASIC for anything but quick and dirty stuff. If you feel you must >>use BASIC then you shouldn't be protecting them but rather let others see the >>actual code. >>D'Arcy J.M. Cain (darcy@druid) | > >I continue to make several thousand dollars a year on shareware programs >that I have written in BASIC, and I laugh at this kind of elitism all the >way to the bank. I am an English professor and I use spaghetti code to write ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >programs more complicated and more useful than those of most computer science >graduates who pontificate these linguistic prejudices. > With new BASIC compiler like MicroSoft PDS, you can program really big program without spaghetti code. With Version 7.0, exe generated are as small as could be a C program. I think the choice of a language depand of the kink of application you want to write. Accounting for one is easylly done in BASIC because of string manipulation, text editor should be in C or Pascal and operating system in C. Assembler should never be use (except for special program like device driver) because it is to hard to maintain -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Meunier Institut de Recherche d'Hydro-Quebec Ingenieur 1800 Montee Ste-Julie, Varennes Internet: robert@ireq.hydro.qc.ca Qc, Canada, J3X 1S1