Maybe it depends too on what you did with BASIC.

Heh... I bought the first (?only?) TRS-80 in my state with Level II BASIC and only 4K of RAM. I was mostly an electronics geek back then, so mostly did circuit simulation-type stuff. Due to lack of cash and RAM, I had to move into assembler quickly. (3284 bytes free of RAM isn't a lot in BASIC, but it's a vast open field in ASM!).

...but although the flow control was fairly primitive in the variant of BASIC I used (mostly consisting of IF ... GOTO and GOSUB), it was in most other respects a rather higher-level language than C.

Learning C after assembly, I never really considered it a high level language, but more another version of ASM with nicer syntax and easier to work with. (I would frequently compile to ASM to help me debug my code, so I could see if what I thought I said agreed with what the compiler thought I said.)

Critically, BASIC has dynamic-length strings, which I for years considered to be the single most important data structure...I tend to think hashes are just as important...

I wholeheartedly agree with that! For me, the big attraction to Perl is hashes and regex. Any time the problem at hand feels like it wants one of those, I start vim and enter "#!/usr/bin/perl -w". I need to learn more list-based tricks (Schwartzian transform, etc.) to enlarge my bag o' tricks...

I don't use Emacs for the key bindings.
I always thought that people who used Emacs for all had extra pinky fingers or were concert pianists or something! </joke> (Sorry! But you gotta admit that after CP/M's ED editor, VI is somewhat of a natural!)

Don't wait (to learn Lisp). Shoehorn it into your Copious Free Time. It only takes a couple dozen hours to become conversant in Emacs lisp, and it's probably the best time investment I've ever made
I've actually started a couple of times, but have a lack of that substance you refer to as "Copious Free Time". I've heard many people whose opinion I respect tell me that learning Lisp is very worth my while, and I believe it. The references to functional programming have really piqued my interest. However, I've been coding long enough that learning a new language isn't interesting enough--fun, but it's a little too much like work. I turn on the computer, crack open the Lisp dox and a bash shell, type a couple of lines of code, and then start wondering what's on Slashdot/Groklaw/PerlMonks/...

Now, when I have free time, I like to dabble in Metalworking and work on a steam engine or something else that I can plunk down on a table and have people be able to *see* what I do.

--roboticus

In reply to Re^2: YAC (Yet Another Challenge): Oldest Useful Computer Text by roboticus
in thread YAC (Yet Another Challenge): Oldest Useful Computer Text by hsmyers

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.