bobochan

It was not just an influence on BASIC, but the raison d'etre, "It should be a stepping-stone for students who may later wish to learn one of the standard languages, such as FORTRAN or ALGOL."

https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basicmanual_1964.pdf

This is a different take, but I have always been a huge fan of Damian Conway's Lingua::Romana::Perligata, a thought experiment in writing Perl in Latin.

Just a taste from the documentation: "To simplify the mind-numbingly complex rules of declension and conjugation that govern inflexions in Latin, Perligata treats all user-defined scalar and array variables as neuter nouns of the second declension -- singular for scalars, plural for arrays."

Vermont. 58F (≈ 14.4C). The only exception is that heat is never turned on before November 1st, so if it is a cold October then you better find your good flannel shirt.

I like web sites that I can easily access from inside the terminal. My goto browser is links and I usually check these URLs a couple of times a day:

https://text.npr.org https://lite.cnn.com/en

Wow! That was a nostalgia moment. My first professional gig was in 1988 when I took over writing dBase code for an NSF sponsored evaluation project. That taught me enough to work internationally for USAID writing dbBase code for all kinds of projects around the world, and still make it back to the US in time to catch the beginning of the dotCom boom, Linux, and all of the other great stuff over the past 30+ years.

It was an awesome time. Folks laugh at all of the tech now, but QuickBasic 4.5, Turbo C++, and dBase were amazing tools for building stuff that was very cool at the time.

The two best decisions I ever made were living and working overseas for several years when I was in my early 20s, and then moving to a small town in Vermont in my early 30s. I had a lot of adventures early, learned new skills, and then settled down somewhere with a great home - work balance.

I definitely remember those days. Both our kids are in university now and the part of the chart that spoke to me was seeing that steep drop off when the kids reach a certain age. It was a big change when the kids started high school and all of their sports and activities were based around the school instead of parent volunteers.

It is fine now, and it is great to hear what the kids are learning in physics and math, and even cooler when they ask the old man for advice on a programming assignment. I would really love to have a couple of hours back though when we were all doing Lego robotics together. I miss those days.

We have a local rink in our town and I volunteered for years as a "hoser," part of a crew of volunteers that would shovel off the rink late at night and then spray a new layer of ice so that the kids would have a fresh surface in the morning. Every year, without fail, a local engineering student would show up while I was getting setup and ask if they could test their new "backyard Zamboni" on the rink (e.g. some variation on an upside down propane grill on wheels) and I would watch as they learned the painful lesson that there were not 20 MPH winds in the lab.

Great response! Pelé coming to the US was a HUGE kick start to soccer in this country and I will never forget him kicking a ball with President Gerald Ford at the White House.

You are probably right about the other players that you mentioned as well, and given some distance from their remarkable achievements we will absolutely see them in even higher regard than we already do.

That said, "Pelé: Birth of a Legend" is just a terrible movie... but I am trying not to hold that against him.

Pelé is definitely the choice of many pundits, but he played most of his club soccer in the Brazilian leagues. In Brazil's World Cup efforts he had a superb team around him.

Maradona is given the nod because he played in Spain and Italy, in addition to Argentina, and dominated a World Cup with a much weaker team.

Very cool. I use it to teach SQL. I added a CodeMirror region for editing SQL code and have buttons that load a few example databases. The advantage of this is that students do not have to install anything, they can just visit the web site, and they can practice destructive steps like deleting rows or a table, and then just reset everything with a button click. Discovering SQL.js was a huge moment.

I used to produce absolutely enormous bibliographies of scientific publication for NSF reports from databases. We used to try and write complex macros to format the text properly (not sure if we didn't know about RTF, or whether it was supported?), but it was always slow and painful. Then we found that if we used Find/Replace to put something like a [BeginItalics][EndItalics] code at the end of the title, followed by a [BeginItalics] code at the beginning of the title WP 5.1 would ignore the second [BeginItalics] code and format everything properly. We immediately figured out that we just needed to add tokens in the text and then could format hundreds of pages of text in just a few seconds. Happiness ensued.

Thank you, that was a very inspiring response.

I completely agree with you about the unrealized potential, but my greatest regret over the past 50 years is not about the technology, but our ability to harness it. I remember helping to setup a computer show at our local high school when I was still very young. The local vendors had agreed to donate an Apple //+ to the school in return for having space to show off all of their wares. We were thrilled and I can vividly remember my father saying that my generation would be the last one to learn programming as an add-on elective skill. He imagined a world where everyone could harness the power of digital technologies and that programming, building, tinkering, would be second nature to all of us.

We spend our time thinking about UI glitter because we gave up on that dream of having every student learn to program. We took the exercises out of math and science books where we asked students to write programs to use the Pythagorean theorem or convert Celsius to Fahrenheit. It became "enough" to learn how to enter a few numbers in a spreadsheet and perhaps add a trend line.

A few hard working people in a garage can still turn out wonderful things, but if we really want to see the promise of technology then we need to fix the bigger problem of building an educational system that empowers many more people.

This is one of the strangest takes that I have ever read. I can remember my dad's turn on the waiting list finally coming up so that it was his turn to bring the HP calculator home from the government lab where he worked for the weekend. It was an absolute marvel. The whole family sat around the kitchen table for hours as he talked about RPN and showed us how the calculator worked. It was magic.

Almost 50 years later I have an incredibly powerful computer that I carry around in my pocket and I call it "my phone". It can solve all kinds of mathematical equations, display live video, and communicate in real time with the furthest corners of the globe. Saying that I "expect technology to suck" is just completely bizarre. I have witnessed amazing changes and have access to technology that were just Star Trek visions when I was young.

Sure. I really thought a lot of the early exercises were things that my students would enjoy doing, especially ISBN, Cash, and Caesar. I sent them to the CS50 web site and even showed them my own C solutions so that they could translate them. I am teaching a lot of students that have never programmed before, so one of my big takeaways is that they are not just learning Language X, they are learning lessons in programming that are applicable in many other languages.

One more thing, with the course needing to be quickly adapted to Zoom last spring, I really noticed the importance of being able to give students rubrics and tests so that they could run their code with different inputs and make sure they were getting the correct outputs. That might seem obvious, but in the past the class was often in lab mode where I could walk around the class and work with them interactively.

My son took the AP version of the CS50 course last year in high school and showed me some of the exercises and videos. I immediately updated a lot of my own class materials after watching them and relentlessly hyped the edX class as a great companion to what we were learning.

The entire environment, the culture, that Professor Malan has created is absolutely fantastic and I am incredibly grateful that Harvard has made this content available.

I have! I actually really enjoy taking computer classes to learn computer languages that I already know in languages that I am studying, e.g. I took a Java class "Initiation à la programmation (en Java)" at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on Coursera. It is a great way to learn new words and build up your vocabulary. I am looking for more German courses now.

My two plus decades in academia have been amazing. I am surrounded by really cool people with interesting backgrounds doing fascinating work. Our students work incredibly hard and really bring a lot of positive energy to campus. The hours can be long, especially when teaching, but there is also a lot of flexibility which was really important when my kids were growing up.

Yes! QuickBasic 4.5 was my jam! I used to churn out apps with that left and right.

Does anyone have a source for a Super Serial Card, or similar that would work with this? I have had my //e since '83 and deeply regret that I never picked one of those up.

Yes. I have been in academia for over twenty years and having access to NAG has always been a given.

I have used emacs for decades so I do not see the need for a big restart, but your question does remind me of something RMS said years ago. I cannot find the exact quote, but the essence of it was that any editor that offered the programmability of emacs was worthy of the name regardless of its keybindings, etc. In that sense I do not believe there would be any problem with emacs following the model of Fortran; it can look and behave quite different, but at its core it has to be open and accessible for the user to extend and adapt.

I respect this opinion, and some of my neighbors feel the same way. For me it is a matter of assessing the relative risks, and there has not been a violent crime in my town in anyone's living memory. I am certainly not opposed to gun ownership, but a biathlon rifle is not exactly made for self-defense.

There is a benefit to living in an area of trust even beyond the mental benefit of being free from worry and stress. A great bonus for me is that I do not have to be home when someone needs to come service the heating system or look at the pipe under the sink. Local tradespeople know that the doors are generally open in our neighborhood so they can come and go as needed without anyone having to take time off from work to let them in. It is also very helpful for our neighbors who can get into the garage to borrow a tool or leave something they just baked on our kitchen table.

There are definitely places where I would probably not feel comfortable leaving everything open, but I am glad that most of my life has been spent in a community where we do not need to worry about our personal safety.

I am in the same situation. I felt a massive surge of anxiety just reading all of the suggestions here. There are locks on some of the doors from the 1940s, but to the best of my knowledge they have never been used and we do not have any keys.

Whoa! My uncle was the curator of that exhibition, Software, at the Jewish Museum of NY. Fun fact, that exhibit lost so much money that the museum stopped doing art exhibitions for a long time. I believe they only resumed doing them in the past few years.

My kids never showed much interest in program despite my encouragement, but this year our high school changed its programming curriculum to follow Harvard's CS50 model:

https://cs50.harvard.edu

The first half of the course is mostly in C and then switches to Python, and I really think it is a very well designed course that get students doing some interesting stuff very quickly while building a solid foundation for future learning. There is an online version of the course and students can watch all of the videos and lectures. I believe there is also a teacher training program for the curriculum.

I was surprised when my son came home and started asking me questions about malloc and free, but he has learned a lot in a very short period of time.

Wow! Congratulations! This is a great story. Best of luck with your new position. São Paulo sounds great.

Vertex has been playing hardball. They came to an agreement with Scotland last September and England in October, but other agreements are coming slowly. It is a real hardship for patients following Trikafta on Twitter and reading every day about gaining 30 points of lung function after only a few weeks, but not having the treatment available.

CF patients may have close to a normal lifespan with Trikafta, assuming that progress is made on treating some common infections, such as a pseudomonas aeruginosa. That means a lot of patients getting a very expensive drug for a very long time.

I still write quite a few things in VBA. Most of this is for research or teaching purposes where I want to add a few things to Excel, but there is a surprising amount of demand from management consulting companies that want a front end or some sensitivity analysis added to a model that they have developed for a client.

My favorite thing: cooking. I have been the primary cook at home for 30 years but only in the past few years have I had time for anything more than what we can get on the table in 20 minutes after soccer practice.

Every once in while I get a new cookbook like "Voila! Effortless French Cookbook," "German Meals at Oma's", and "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" and then work my way through the recipes that look interesting. I have found a lot of recipes that take hours of preparation and cooking, but I have also found many that I love that I can get together in 20 minutes.

Spending some time learning how to cook is very relaxing, but it also is quite cost effective because now we very rarely go out to dinner. The best part is that the whole family actually looks forward to trying new meals together, so Friday nights have become what they should be: long hours gathered around the table talking and laughing, eating well and drinking wine by candle light.

I cherish every Friday night that the kids are home from university and appreciate even more the quiet nights that I share with my wife.