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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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

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

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

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

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