Chris Cunnington wrote:
Thank you very much for replying. Well, I'm newish to computers and programming. I'm surrounded at the computer clubs I attend here in Toronto such as Unix Unanimous, The Toronto Linux Users Group, The Beach Outings Club (my Smalltalk club) by people who have been programming forever.
I'm also a member of the Toronto PET Users Group, which has been going since 1979. That's PET as in Personal Electronic Transactor from 1977 and Commodore. Next week I'll be going to TPUG to attend a discussion about Demo programming. That's in the Demoscene, which is mainly Europeans writing video demonstrations and SID chip music on their Commodore 64's and Amigas. Wild, really, that they do that.
I mentioned Jim Butterfield, because I wasn't programming in the early 1980s, and I know he's famous amongst people here in Toronto and, obviously, at TPUG, so I assumed you'd heard of him. A bit of a stretch, I guess.
So, I'm interested in 6502 assembler, and I just bought Randal Hyde's "The Art of Assembly Language" for the 80x86 set. The point of this is that I've gotten into a large topic -- computer programming -- and I keep trying to see it from different points of view. Assembly seems to me another great, bottom up way to learn about this stuff. Being surrounded by people who know so much more can be anxiety producing, so I'm climbing the learning curve, and I favour the historical approach, thus the interest in old computers, Commodore, and such.
I liked playing Gemstone Warrior. Actually all my brothers and sister did.
Commodore 64. Still Ready.
Cheers,
Chris Cunnington
Hi,
Thanks, I'll let Trouba know that you liked the game and that we talked about it. He and I designed the game together. I did the programming and he did the graphics.
Assembly language is a great way to learn computing. Once you learn that then you know it's much harder for people to pass off nonsense by you. You comprehend the details much better.
If you can program 6502 then you can program any processor out there. You may wish to start learning with the latest version of the X86 processor family though. Learning that could be better for your career - assuming that's a direction in your life.
I learned assembly before pretty much any other language. I learned 32 bit Interdata assembly before I learned Basic! My favorite languages are Assembly Language, Smalltalk and ZokuScript. That green 6502 book I mentioned is very well worn indeed.
To me Smalltalk has become the new assembly language.
That's why I'm building ZokuScript - it's the a higher level language that builds upon the concepts of languages like Smalltalk, Lisp, Erlang, Assembly, Forth, Io, Self, Slang, etc....
While performing an exhaustive search through the possible spaces in the universe of language syntaxes I've come across some enhancements that work naturally for Smalltalk while keeping true to the first principles of messaging passing syntax, everything is an object including ALL meta data and meta operations.
I'm contributing those discoveries to the Smalltalk community in the hopes that some of them will be adopted. All of the discoveries and ideas that I've presented, plus many more, are going into the ZokuScript language since the applications and systems that I'm building require certain linguistic capabilities not easily expressible in existing languages without a lot of work.
I encourage you to continue your efforts with assembly language.
Cheers,
Peter