Why Can't We Put a BASIC On the Phone? 783
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Unknown Lamer
from the that's-make-it-too-easy dept.
from the that's-make-it-too-easy dept.
theodp writes "In the Sixties, we could put a man on the moon. Nowadays, laments jocastette, America's tech giants can't even put a BASIC on the phone. Woz managed to crank out a BASIC interpreter for the 6502 in the '70s. As did Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So, why — at a time when development has never been easier — can't Google, Apple, and Microsoft manage to support a free BASIC or other programming-for-the-masses development environment on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones?"
My limited experience with Android development showed using Java to be obtuse and downright obnoxious to do anything (at least without Eclipse, and even with it doing anything non-standard required digging through horrendous ant buildfiles). And, of course, without a REPL things were even more obnoxious. There is the android-scripting project, but it doesn't provide particularly exhaustive access to the platform.
Codify for iPad (Score:5, Informative)
We are starting to see some programming environments where you code on the device itself - one really cool one is Codify [blogspot.com] for the iPad. They have really thought through how to make entry of code easier using the on-screen keyboard, and you could learn quite a lot of programming concepts developing using this tool.
Re:BASIC is a horrible language. (Score:4, Informative)
It Is Available (Score:5, Informative)
There's a 99 cent app for that! (Score:2, Informative)
On the iPhone or iPad, there is a BASIC programming environment (sandboxed). It's called BASIC!, and can be found here:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/basic!/id362411238?mt=8
Indeed, Microsoft has done exactly this (Score:5, Informative)
For that matter (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Attention Old People (Score:2, Informative)
Excellent. So with JavaScript on a webpage, how do I access text messages on my phone?
Oh, you mean JavaScript in an app environment?
And you don't really mean pure JavaScript?
Gotcha.
Note that the story's question isn't so much about the particular programming language of choice, but about the capabilities; hence the pointing out that the Android Scripting project also has rather limited access to the platform - even if it's much better than javascript in a webpage.
Re:It Is Available (Score:3, Informative)
Don't confuse Slashdotters with fact. (I have Basic and Lua on my still-in-jail iPhone 4S)
Five seconds of googling later (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.basic4ppc.com/ [basic4ppc.com] comes up with Basic4Android.
Free Basic (Score:5, Informative)
There is also Basic! [laughton.com], which is free as in a speech about beer.
Re:exactly. (Score:3, Informative)
That was the dumbest remark possible - as the other poster indicated - and this anonymous poster we all know he'll stay one. Another "it" masturbating to the sound of it's own voice. Ayn Rand was a sociopath, who profited from the system she detested, and hypocrits one and all.
From Ayn Rand's Wiki page:
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational egoism and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of most other philosophers and philosophical traditions.
She was a capitalist. The system she detested was communism. Being a capitalist and making a profit is the exact opposite of being hypocritical. The two kinda go hand in hand. Now when a raging liberal makes a nice profit, that's being hypocritical. Learn your definitions first.
You might want to learn a few facts about a person before you go around calling them names like "sociopath". When you are that passionate about something you are so ignorant about it really just makes you out to be a jackass.
Re:Why BASIC? What for? (Score:4, Informative)
C is great but really - those curly braces may seem like a sexy thing in a geeky way but they seriously decrease the legibility of the code. They may have been a poor design decision.
No the curly brackets in C and C++ are actually a very good design idea however if you don't like them you can easily replace them with "begin" and "end" or whatever words or symbols you want for a delimiter. The problem with doing that is your code is going to look strange to another programmer. Still if it's your own code and you are not going to have other people looking at it then you can do what you want.
Re:BASIC is an awful language (Score:4, Informative)
Why would you want BASIC in modern age with all the choice of simple scripting languages?
Android programming is expressive and elegant (Score:4, Informative)
Java is much complained about, on the one hand by people who think it is too hard, and on the other hand by people who think it is not sufficiently expressive. But the evidence is you can build a world-beating OS with a Java userland. And evidently it isn't urgent to augment or replace Java, either with more expressive JVM languages like Scala, or supposedly simpler languages available for the JVM like the BASIC-like Jabaco, even though this could be done for Android since the translation to Dalvik bytecode is downstream of compiling into Java bytecode.
Java has great static code analysis tooling and great refactoring. There are books like Thinking in Java and Effective Java that will make you fluent in the idioms that make Java understandable, debuggable, and maintainable. For a programming beginner I'd suggest Learning Android and Head First Java. Android's documentation, tutorials, and examples are enormously improved since Android first came out.
Every language has screws, but a good case can be made that Java has fewer of them than many other languages.
Re:exactly. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why BASIC? What for? (Score:0, Informative)
Python is a joke, even the author confessed it was made just to get him cred, position and money from selling the docs and manuals. The more problems you have with it, the more traffic on his site and more manuals moved. He is now at Google, "a happy employee". Also you identified C/C++ is so much better, thats because it has been created to solve urgent problems at hand.. and it clearly shows. Python is borderline fraud.
Re:Why BASIC? What for? (Score:5, Informative)
WP7 has TouchDevelop.
Android has several BASIC interpreters, JS, Lua , Ruby, and a couple of custom-designed languages in the Market.
You were saying?
Re:Why BASIC? What for? (Score:2, Informative)
You don't know what you're talking about.
I do serious numeric simulation every day with Python. Yes, straight Python sucks for execution speed. But using Numpy, your array arithmetic happens as C loops, so the speed is practically identical. Testing it now, doing 1e10 double-precision additions (1e5 arrays of size 1e5 in Numpy), the execution time in Numpy is 15 seconds, versus 21 seconds for C. (I assume the difference is from optimisation in the Numpy binaries.) You claimed that Numpy is slower by "a large distance", rather than being faster.
Yes, there are vector processing libraries in C that get higher speeds. There's also Scipy, and various Numpy submodules, that do similar things. The type of tasks you need to do will determine which one has better coverage. For my part, I've found that Numpy-compatible modules do everything I need them for, and are much easier to use than their C equivalents - I can write an efficient program in much less time with Python. (This is a big deal in science, in which a particular simulation program may only be run once or twice at full-scale, so development time is critical.)
The fact that you describe libraries as giving a "factor 200" makes me doubt your understanding of the subject, though. Libraries generally implement some clever algorithm that scales better than a simple approach. This means that they will have a speed advantage over the simpler implementation that varies wildly according to the size of the data you're working with: a fast Fourier transform, for example, might be billions of times faster or several times slower than a conventional Fourier transform, depending on the size of the data.