BASIC and the Timber Tom 'Beep Boop'

Info

This post was a voice recording transcribed by my Pixel 8 Pro, then cleaned up, proofread, and formatted by Google Gemini. It has been carefully scrutinized to make sure that it still accurately conveys my original message, and is less than 2% different outside of grammatical changes. (as a side note, as of 2/11/24, Gemini will actively refuse to correct anything with a cussword in it. The second paragraph had 'fuck' in it, and when it got there it would delete the response and say "I'm just a chatbot and can't help with this" Frankly, that is quite fucking lame.)

So, I was going through Y Combinator and saw a post about this dude who created a free version of BASIC (freebasic.net). BASIC is one of those really old programming languages, so it seems kind of pointless in this day and age because basically any modern programming language can do the same stuff easier, better, and faster.

As an aside

As an aside, I cracked up during this. I'm so used to voice typing that I find myself saying "comma" out loud when I want punctuation! That's really funny.

Anyway, Python is essentially the modern version of BASIC, and it's much better. You can actually code some really cool stuff in it without too much trouble, unlike BASIC. But reading about this project and seeing comments from people who talked about how BASIC was their first language reminded me of something my dad always told me: His first computer was a Commodore 64, and he would spend all day writing BASIC programs. These programs would do simple stuff, and it would take him hours to make the computer beep or show a green square on the screen. Whenever he saw something crazy on modern computers, he'd always say, "Back in my day, it took me four hours to make my Commodore 64 go beep boop and show a little green box on the screen!" It was a really funny thing he'd do, and I can't help but remember my dad having so much fun with that.

This makes me think about how much my dad enjoyed those early days of programming, and how I think it is so weird and/or unfortunate that he lost interest in computers and tech.