iPhone SDK delayed- February 26, 2008 It's beginning to look as though the iPhone SDK may not ship this month since Apple has been silent about it. It was supposed to ship by the end of February. Of course this doesn't really have any impact on Run BASIC since it will not use the SDK, but it will produce apps that run in the iPhone's Safari web browser.We haven't talked much about our plans for iPhone support in Run BASIC. We should have more to say in the next month or so.http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/iphone-sdk-delayed.html BASIC is bad because it's too easy- February 22, 2008 A response to a recent post read, "BASIC is good, but I think it should be avoided as a first language because it pampers the programmer too much."I won't be the first person to say that BASIC is perfect. There is no perfect language. However, to recommend that a first language should not "pamper" the beginning programmer seems to me misses the mark completely.I'm guessing that this means that languages should force the beginner to be aware of low level details such as the type of numeric value.http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/basic-is-bad-because-its-too-easy.html Taking the Arc Challenge- February 7, 2008 Paul Graham, a very famous Lisp programmer who is well known for his continuations based web framework has invented a language called Arc (a version of Lisp). He came up with a challenge to see how others would implement a trivial web program in their favorite language.Here's the Arc program:(defop said req(aform wlink (pr "you said: " (arg _ "foo"))(pr "click here")(input "foo")(submit)))Follow this link to see other submissions in different languages. Scroll down to to bottom to see the Run...http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/taking-arc-challenge.html Web programming in... Java- February 6, 2008 I mean, why Of course that's how I feel about any kind of programming in Java. I recently found a blog where someone reviewed Wallace Wang's Beginning Programming book which teaches Liberty BASIC. The blogger seemed to enjoy Liberty BASIC and then went on to say that we was planning to learn Java. I wish that those presidential candidates would promise to reform our educational system by banning Java from k12 schools. People who are just learning programming need something that gives them a...http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/web-programming-in-java.html Knocked on the head with BASIC- February 5, 2008 A close friend of mine schooled in C++, Smalltalk, Java and Groovy told me the other day that he has written his first BASIC program by using Run BASIC. He had never written code in BASIC before, but he took my word for it that BASIC is a great language for throwing together solutions quickly. He said he was struck by the lightness of the BASIC language and that he enjoyed working in it. This is my paraphrase of what he said, because I don't remember his exact words.I know there are a lot of.http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/knocked-on-head-with-basic.html iPhone development - activation experience- February 4, 2008 Since we have decided to create some iPhone development features for Run BASIC I bought an iPhone for this purpose. I thought it would be interesting to post my personal iPhone experience.So, I went to the Apple store. I said that I wanted to buy an iPhone, so the youthful Apple employee grabbed me a small black box from behind the counter and handed it to me. "Big day," he said with a certain air of importance. I thought that was a little over the top. I mean, it's a phone. I wasn't having a...http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/02/iphone-development-activation.html Debugging Run BASIC Web Apps- February 1, 2008 In Run BASIC's first release there is effectively no built-in debugger. Of course you can use print to log to the browser page or to a file, and this is no more or less than many other web scripting systems. We aim to do something about this in the very near future.One of our users suggested that it would be good to create an inspector panel in Run BASIC itself and that we should add some reflection via an EVAL$() function that would allow arbitrary execution of BASIC code at runtime. We...http://basicprogramming.blogspot.com/2008/01/debugging-run-basic-web-apps.html |