Basic was the first language that I learned. I grew up around 30 minutes from Dartmouth College, so this might not have been a coincidence. The excerpt gets at the idea that programming languages are influenced by their physical location, like the PRINT function built into BASIC was literally for printing something on a Dartmouth printer. It also notes the historical influence languages carry with them once they've left their original location, like the existence of the PRINT statement once BASIC left physical printers and moved onto machines like the Commodore 64. This also got me to go back and look at my old BASIC code, accomplishing some of the same things we've done in Processing (in a terrible and uglier way). It's interesting to me that while I have learned other languages, I still catch myself framing things in BASIC methods, like I am still carrying it and it's constructs with me.
The book clearly has a lot of design effort put in. The font and way the authors choose to display code in the written form is also really interesting. How did they choose the fonts and styles associated with the code? It seems natural to see code printed in the monospace font varieties that we associate with old school terminals, but writing code is not written like this anymore. Coders love making their workspace visually appealing and almost always break away from the old way of displaying code in progress, but it's rare to see code printed out that doesn't have the archaic feel attached. Even GitHub styles CODE BLOCKS as monospace and dull. Why do we think it's natural to force these old ways of looking at code on code presented for reading and not on code presented while writing it?
:exclamation:Late, sorry! :exclamation:
Basic was the first language that I learned. I grew up around 30 minutes from Dartmouth College, so this might not have been a coincidence. The excerpt gets at the idea that programming languages are influenced by their physical location, like the
PRINTfunction built into BASIC was literally for printing something on a Dartmouth printer. It also notes the historical influence languages carry with them once they've left their original location, like the existence of thePRINTstatement once BASIC left physical printers and moved onto machines like the Commodore 64. This also got me to go back and look at my old BASIC code, accomplishing some of the same things we've done in Processing (in a terrible and uglier way). It's interesting to me that while I have learned other languages, I still catch myself framing things in BASIC methods, like I am still carrying it and it's constructs with me.The book clearly has a lot of design effort put in. The font and way the authors choose to display code in the written form is also really interesting. How did they choose the fonts and styles associated with the code? It seems natural to see code printed in the monospace font varieties that we associate with old school terminals, but writing code is not written like this anymore. Coders love making their workspace visually appealing and almost always break away from the old way of displaying code in progress, but it's rare to see code printed out that doesn't have the archaic feel attached. Even GitHub styles
CODE BLOCKSas monospace and dull. Why do we think it's natural to force these old ways of looking at code on code presented for reading and not on code presented while writing it?