Captain Jack wrote:

> Wow... so many thoughts, and the coffee is only beginning to swirl in my 
> brain...

Y'aarrr! ;-)

> Bear in mind that the world wasn't as connected then as it is now. 
> Advancement in technology was slower, people used books and published papers 
> to share technical ideas, not the Internet.

Sure. Back then, if you wanted better graphics, you had to wait for the 
next home computer to be released. Today, more powerful graphics cards 
come out almost weekly. (Although we have long since reached the point 
where the graphical quality is as high as anybody needs, and you're only 
arguing about 3D rendering power.)

Look at the C64 with it's 16-colour graphics. 5 years later the A500 has 
12-bit colour and up to 64 colours on-screen at once. Another 5 years 
and the A1200 gives you 24-bit colour and 256 colours at once. That's a 
while to wait. ;-)

> Even now, people use different 
> programming languages because, for the most part, programmers are 
> provincialists who tend to think the first language they learned is the best 
> one.

That must make me rare then. I can program in BASIC [I MEAN OLD SKOOL 
BASIC WITH ALL-CAPS AND LINE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF A TEXT EDITOR], Pascal 
(which is structured), PostScript (which is weird), JavaScript, Java, 
Smalltalk, Eiffel (which are all OOP), Haskell (which is functional), 
SQL (which is relational), and I have a vague grasp of Lisp and Prolog. 
I've also written in machine code. (No, I don't mean assembly. I *mean* 
machine code. I couldn't afford an assembler, so I assembled the program 
by hand with a big book of op-code tables...)

Did I mention POV-Ray SDL in there?

The first langauge I learned was BASIC, and it sux. Even fancy AMOS sux.

[For anybody that doesn't know: AMOS is BASIC with bells on. Sort of 
vaguely like Visual Basic, in that AMOS gives you an IDE and powerful 
multimedia features, but the actual language itself has a billion syntax 
features but still isn't all that powerful. AMOS Professional comes with 
a 2,000-page user guide and has over 800 commands. It arrives on 14 DD 
floppies - most of which are bitmaps, music, sprites and demo programs.]

> Pascal was never intended to be efficient on the inside, and was often 
> rejected by people working to create real-world software for that reason. 
> Wirth invented Pascal specifically as a teaching tool to educate students in 
> the concepts of nested, structured programming with a hierarchy of 
> visibility of token names.

I've heard this before. I never really understood why Pascal couldn't be 
a useful real-world language. (Aside from a few obvious flaws which 
should have been easy to fix.)

> BASIC was also developed as a teaching tool, but it was also considered the 
> best choice by many for popular use (the name itself may have lead that 
> charge, based on the power of suggestion). More importantly, BASIC is 
> interpreted, so you can ship it without a compiler, linker, or memory for 
> large symbol tables. Slap it in a ROM, stick it in your gray box, and start 
> selling.

Lisp isn't too hard to interpret either. (But arguably too hard for 
8-year-olds to program with.) Smalltalk is pretty easy to interpret, and 
easy on the brain too. Prolog would also not be hard to interpret, but 
probably not especially useful for home users.

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