Comment by englishrookie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by englishrookie | Hacker News Reader

I had the exact same use case for my parents' camp site in France. In 1997, I had programmed a camp site management software for the Atari 1040 ST in GFA Basic. It was used for booking reservations, registering new guests, and printing invoices.

At the time, this solution (both the computer and the programming language) were already outdated by at least 5 years. But it was the cheapest solution for my parents, since they couldn't afford a new computer (having just started the camp site).

Of course, it took me hundreds of hours to complete the software but I didn't mind since the project allowed me to sharpen my programming chops at a pretty basic level. For instance, I had to implement my own scrolling routine (there were no text areas in GFA Basic).

Theoretically it should have been possible to make system calls to GEM routines (the UI library in ROM) in GFA Basic, but I never got it to work.

The computer was used until 2005 or so, when the disk drive gave out.

[edit: grammar]

Calling into GEM from GFA Basic was dubious because GEM AES made heavy use of void pointers, casting, and other C-isms. GFA was of course a garbage collected interpreted language. So GFA had its own wrappers for a bunch of stuff, but not everything.

It was an excellent basic though. With a top-notch IDE-like editor with auto-complete, auto-indentation, folding, etc. I tried for years to find a similar experience with other languages on Linux, etc.

I think something was lost during the last decades.

There we were using a mix of high level languages, with some C and Assembly along the way.

Some of us have watches more powerfull than they were, and yet there is this resitence to use more developer friendly languages like those used to be.

Like, probably someone would tell you that using Basic to code an ESP32 would be wrong, yet you experienced how good the development experience felt like in a similarly constrained hardware.

I think these days the JetBrains IDEs are as good or better than GFA's was. And as far as language, Python or Ruby are fairly close in experience.

I fired up GFA on an ST a few years ago just to relive the experience, and it wasn't as good as I remembered :-)

To be fair, JetBrains IDEs are absolute battleships in terms of features, but also of resource consumption. GFA is in its way much more elegant, especially regarding the capabilities of the systems it ran on.

Is python (micropython on the ESP32) truly worse?

No, and that is the point, ESP32 is more powerfull that most MS-DOS machines, and we had plenty of high level languages to chose from.

Naturally for games and demoscene, Assembly was the name of the game, but for LOB stuff?

Clipper, FoxPro and applications built with Turbo Pascal/Turbo Vision were all over the place.

One of the neat things about GFA Basic was its built in support for graphics. It was almost trivially easy to plot graphs of your math homework equations. Or to plot fractals (very slowly).

Absolutely. The planar colour graphics on the ST were awkward to work with, but GFA made it easy.

I feel the same way in the modern day about Processing.

https://processing.org/examples/mousepress.html

I have written GEM bindings to Lisp for the Atari ST, it isn't really tied to C.

Populating AES structures requires passing pointers to strings and various unions and packed structures INTIN/ADDRIN, etc. I remember this being not so simple with the GFA I had. Maybe later versions improved interacting with that kind of thing.

Ah yes, sounds like 3.0 added all the proper AES structures and a bunch of other goodies https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/gfa_basic3.html

ah yes GFA Basic. I loved it.

Wrote a lot of dumb and some quite useful applications with it. I had the ignorance back then to think I could write my own database system. Which I did.

But it lacked almost all attributes of a real database system

Eventually I got Lattice C and that was the start of a long and close relationship with C that helped me through academia and later on jobs.

Every now and agan I download and play with an ST emulator. I dont get the magic I felt back then.

The low resolution even black and white is just too limiting now. I only had a BW monitor for my ST.

I did find a way to get an emulator to run as a TT (oh how I wanted that back in the day). TT can be fixed to run at a semi decent resolution. Unfortunately, not much software could run on it. Most crashed right away.

>But it lacked almost all attributes of a real database system

Did it support ISAM files?

If BASIC had ISAM support from the beginning, maybe it would be as widely used as COBOL..

Big boys BASIC had support for ISAM,

http://neilrieck.net/docs/openvms_notes_vms-basic.html#demo2

Almost wants to make me boot up my AlphaServer! I have a DS10 rotting away downstairs.

Wow, that's a stylin' basic

I, as an Amigan, was always envious of GFA Basic for the ST. Then GFA Basic was ported to the Amiga, and I found it amazing how easy it was to fairly neat stuff with it.

We had AMOS instead. :)

Fair point! I personally only bought AMOS when I was already slowly on my way out from the Amiga, so I never really got into it.

Lattice C was where I got started with C, also. (On an Amiga, though.) 30 years later, most of that knowledge is still useful.

I have not kept up with the new versions of C the language but I can still pick up recent code and understand most of it That is a blessing

With C# 2 --> 9, the code can look entierly different.

I just learned from Wikipedia that Frank Ostrowski, creator of GFA basic, passed away about 10 years ago

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