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Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

This reminds me about my time writing games in Basic on my calculator during math class. I suck at math because of this, but at least I'm an ok programmer.

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Yes! TI Basic on my Texas Instruments graphics calculator was how I spent downtime during math class.

So much so, I remember writing program for solving quadratic equations.

They were supposed to clear the calculators memory during exmas, but the exam invigilators had no idea what calculators could do, so they didn't.

I'd like to think it wasn't cheating... as writing quadratic solver in TI basic is harder than solving simple quadratic equations. And I did do them all by hand anyway in the exams...

I have the same story, but my first program was for solving systems of equations using a variety of methods and showing its work each step of the way. Same as you, I learned the material far more thoroughly than had I studied it in a conventional way.

I was rather sad when Dijkstra said anyone who learnt on BASIC was irrepairably broken :

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/ewd498.html

The second line of code I ever wrote was in BASIC :

  goto 10

That line of code reminded me of the following thing you could do to the Commodore PET[1], one of the first computers to use Microsoft BASIC.

   10 GOTO 10
   RUN

Oops. No way to recover without power cycling the computer. I remember Commodore brought their product to an early computer show, and all the annoying nerds (like me) kept entering that one-line program into the demo computers, much to the annoyance of the nearby sales critters.

And it wasn't possible to patch that quickly, since BASIC was in ROM. They probably had a fix about 12 weeks later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET

I wrote a similar (first) version on my Spectrum 48k. For some reason it initiated the same kind of colour cycle that you'd get when loading a program.

I wish I were as driven now as I was back then. I used to sit for HOURS writing little programs with that horrible PRGM navigation menu. Nowadays I get upset when my color scheme isn't perfect.

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