X16 Manufacturing, Mythbusting and more.

[mortarm]

One of the things all of this this tells me is the sheer popularity of BASIC. It's always been that way, really... I've just ignored it. But the reality is that programming unique things in compiled languages is HARD. Way harder than most people are willing to sign up for, BASIC serves to flatten that curve.

You might be overstating this just a bit. Interest in retro computing is always gonna be a niche hobby, and there's nothing wrong with that, but I wouldn't get my hopes up that BASIC is gonna make some kind of comeback on the mainstream programming front.

As for compiled languages being hard, that's purely subjective. A better modern-day language comparison to BASIC is Python. Next to BASIC, Python is the easiest mainstream language out there. In fact, there are a number of parallels between BASIC and Python.

[ahenry3068]

I don't know if its true anymore. But there was a surprising amount of Commercial Software from the 70's, 80's & 90's
written in BASIC.

[mortarm]

I don't know if its true anymore. But there was a surprising amount of Commercial Software from the 70's, 80's & 90's
written in BASIC.

Heh, definitely NOT true anymore.

[BruceRMcF]

I noticed David saying, rather casually, that the next run will "have the cartridge port turned sideways," or something to that effect.

What does that mean? The X16 dev boards don't have a "cartridge port," they have four expansion slots.

A little while back, they figured out a way to use an expansion slot as a cartridge slot, by feeding out the contents of the ROM bank register ($0001) to lines in the expansion port so that if the value is greater than $3F (the highest internal ROM segment), the board in the slot can be read from and/or written rather than the internal ROM in the ROMbank space in the X16 memory map ($C000-$FFFF).

The mooted design concept for the "Phase 2" X16 console is to have a single expansion slot designed to accept a cartridge.

Having the expansion slot closest to the edge of the board at right angles makes it easier to accommodate internal cards in slots 1-3 and also use of slot 4 as a cartridge port.

[ahenry3068]

There is still VB.Net I would roll some dice to say its used in a lot of IN HOUSE development.

[AMenard]

There is still VB.Net I would roll some dice to say its used in a lot of IN HOUSE development.

VB.net has pretty much nothing to do with Basic at least for version with the .net after their name. It was more of a Microsoft marketing gimmick to add the basic part to the name, to mean it was an easy event driven programming language.