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At ClubCompy there's a reimagined version of BASIC and virtual display reminiscent of the C64 (but vastly more powerful due to HTML5 and modern browsers).

You can write your own programs, save them, and share them with others. Here's one I wrote: game of life simulation.

The system guide (PDF) describing the language is here: ClubCompy System Guide. And there are sample programs on display at the little benchmarking page.

At ClubCompy there's a reimagined version of BASIC and virtual display reminiscent of the C64 (but vastly more powerful due to HTML5 and modern browsers).

You can write your own programs, save them, and share them with others. Here's one I wrote: game of life simulation.

The system guide (PDF) describing the language is here: ClubCompy System Guide. And there are sample programs on display at the little benchmarking page.

At ClubCompy there's a reimagined version of BASIC and virtual display reminiscent of the C64 (but vastly more powerful due to HTML5 and modern browsers).

You can write your own programs, save them, and share them with others. Here's one I wrote: game of life simulation.

The system guide (PDF) describing the language is here: ClubCompy System Guide. And there are sample programs on display at the little benchmarking page.

At ClubCompy there's a reimagined version of BASIC and virtual display reminiscent of the C64 (but vastly more powerful due to HTML5 and modern browsers).

You can write your own programs, save them, and share them with others. Here's one I wrote: game of life simulation.

The system guide (PDF) describing the language is here: ClubCompy System Guide. And there are sample programs on display at the little benchmarking page.

Heeeeeyyyy kids, wanna program your compy just like daddy and mommy do? Put down that mouse and start typing like the pros! At ClubCompy, you get an authentic coding environment with 150% less clicky and draggy (yet still kid friendly!) Buy buy buy now now now!

clubcompy.com

... But since you can't ask for time to be turned back to simple sprite based graphics ...

Sprites with pixel-perfect collision detection do still exist, as well as a BASIC-like language to do your hello world example. Check out ClubCompy if you're interested:

ClubCompy.com

Real world benchmark (has a fun sprite demo at the beginning and program listings to type in)

... But since you can't ask for time to be turned back to simple sprite based graphics ...

Sprites with pixel-perfect collision detection do still exist, as well as a BASIC-like language to do your hello world example. Check out ClubCompy if you're interested:

ClubCompy.com

Real world benchmark (has a fun sprite demo at the beginning and program listings to type in)

Do you know of anything online that is similar to Nibble & Byte magazine?

Slight plug for ClubCompy, which we're creating to do just that.

Clubcompy.com has an easily accessible interpreter for all as a main goal. I'd add that it's BASIC-like language and virtualized graphics engine makes it pretty easy to write fun games.

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the creators of clubcompy.com.)

It's probably Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm ... I'm actually feeling sad about this! I spent a ton of time on my site hacking in IE6 support. Just last month I got my compy characters to FINALLY layout correctly in all cases on IE6. Ok, I can't resist a little war story ... In the past, the right hand column of character DIV's had a vertical offset of like 5 pixels. Why? WHY DID IT LAYOUT LIKE THAT?! There's no reason, no known peekaboo bug or whatever that I could figure was the cause ... it was just IE6 getting its digs in. It's like it had planned bugs that only I would see.

Memory un-management, DOM-splosions, layout goofs, CSS head scratchers - it was like trying to carry water with a bucket that has a bunch of rebel army bullet holes in it. One thing I could always count on, IE6's JavaScript implementation was juuust good enough. Me and Resig always had a way to squeak out of the jungle alive.

  IE6: I beat you. I beat you silly countless times. I won! But, I never thought you'd actually die from the beating. It seems you finally have given up the ghost. R.I.P., ancient warrior. As you rot in the 8th circle of hell, I want you to know that while I cursed you and your creators as foul on a daily basis, I secretly enjoyed our time together.

Dave

Yes, but all of the I/O has to go through the DOM, which is awkward and event-driven. Basically, it requires you to create an I/O library if you want to do anything more complex than prompt() and alert().

For a while I was working on a project which I intended to eventually be a BASIC-in-browser, kind of similar to the Club Compy project... but once I got the basic I/O libraries written (it uses a canvas with named-similarly-to-BASIC Javascript functions to do things like print, locate, and change colors), I got kind of tired of working on it when I realized that it'd probably make a lot more sense to just do everything in Javascript using the I/O engine that I'd built rather than try to make it interpret actual BASIC code.

It was kind of a fun project, though, and it gave me an excuse to delve into things like BASIC's internal storing of floating-point numbers (which for some reason I wanted to reproduce exactly - well, partly because it'd be necessary in order to implement the MKS$ and MKD$ functions anyway). It's not a IEEE standard float, but it's similar.

I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.

I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ and http://cardmeeting.com/ ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.

I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.

If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.

Dave

How about a web based system? ClubCompy's Tasty language does exactly that.

(Disclaimer: I consult on ClubCompy.)

This is a great point. Opera doesn't have a public bugtracker. I didn't know my website was having trouble on Opera until I saw it mentioned in the release notes on Opera 11.10.

CORE-35515 (Opera freezes while loading elements on https://clubcompy.com/ )

Maybe there was something I could do to test and workaround my site freezing Opera, had I known there was an issue at all...

Mozilla's running a public bugtracker is commendable, heck you don't even need to sign up for an account to search for bugs!

But, writing great software is REALLY HARD TO DO! The 10-year old unfixed critical bugs and thousands of unconfirmed bugs is common. Mozilla just wears all that egg on it's face rather than hiding the egg under the trenchcoat like the other guys do.

Ultimately, Firefox will need another complete redesign and rewrite because it collapses under its own weight. Technology and ideas will move past it's current architecture. Sad but true. And then the whole cycle of awesomeness and suckiness can start again.

We use Cassandra for all the user management and virtual file system storage at ClubCompy, It is so blazing fast compared to SQL for both read and writes, and it is very scalable. I've had a node of my storage cluster go down and whole system stays up with no data loss, and it can repair itself once I bring the downed node back up.

Coding to Cassandra is pretty challenging, you have to do all of your data modeling in code or use the new CQL to access the cluster. I wrote about my experiences recently, where I have started using Google's Protocol Buffer to give me more flexibility in how I store my data and describe my column families: Coding to Apache Cassandra with Google's Protocol Buffers

Dave

I was the same way, brother. Type-in games in BASIC on the C64 were the draw because my family was too poor to buy Atari games, and that experience got me hooked. Of my own volition, I went straight to TurboPascal when I outgrew Basic and 6502 Assembly, then Quick C then C++ in college, and for career I was all set for systems-level C++ and later Java/Java EE. Got an enjoyable and profitable career out of the deal.

Tell me what the equivalent path is for kids today? Is drag and drop coding the way to get them hooked? I'm not yet sold on that... It's too flashy and too shallow. Hm, well, maybe not too shallow - that experience teaches good handling of media files, and there is a lot of value there these days. But as a programming tool, I find those systems de-emphasize the use of logic and the building of abstractions and the construction of data structures and of encouraging the development of problem solving, which is the whole point of learning to program. I feel like we're going to lose our edge and have less qualified replacements coming up - worldwide, not just here in the states.

So how about ClubCompy? It's got a BASIC-like language, nostalgic for us 8-bit veterans. The character generator is my favorite part to dink around with. Sprites are my second favorite now that the collision detection is working properly, and it's got 256 sprites instead of just 8!

https://clubcompy.com

Check out the demos on the homepage and the benchmark page.

Disclaimer: I need to mention that ClubCompy's my site. ;)

I was the same way, brother. Type-in games in BASIC on the C64 were the draw because my family was too poor to buy Atari games, and that experience got me hooked. Of my own volition, I went straight to TurboPascal when I outgrew Basic and 6502 Assembly, then Quick C then C++ in college, and for career I was all set for systems-level C++ and later Java/Java EE. Got an enjoyable and profitable career out of the deal.

Tell me what the equivalent path is for kids today? Is drag and drop coding the way to get them hooked? I'm not yet sold on that... It's too flashy and too shallow. Hm, well, maybe not too shallow - that experience teaches good handling of media files, and there is a lot of value there these days. But as a programming tool, I find those systems de-emphasize the use of logic and the building of abstractions and the construction of data structures and of encouraging the development of problem solving, which is the whole point of learning to program. I feel like we're going to lose our edge and have less qualified replacements coming up - worldwide, not just here in the states.

So how about ClubCompy? It's got a BASIC-like language, nostalgic for us 8-bit veterans. The character generator is my favorite part to dink around with. Sprites are my second favorite now that the collision detection is working properly, and it's got 256 sprites instead of just 8!

https://clubcompy.com

Check out the demos on the homepage and the benchmark page.

Disclaimer: I need to mention that ClubCompy's my site. ;)

Well, we're trying to produce a facsimile of your intro to programming at ClubCompy. The point of the site is to create a simple computer simulation coupled with a BASIC-like language that kids can pick up easily. And we are working on a monthly newsletter that will be a companion on the site. If you sign up for an account, you can even SAVE and LOAD your programs.

You can see an example of what it's capable of doing at the Real-World Benchmark, which gives some sample programs you can type in with the kiddos!

Dave

Well, we're trying to produce a facsimile of your intro to programming at ClubCompy. The point of the site is to create a simple computer simulation coupled with a BASIC-like language that kids can pick up easily. And we are working on a monthly newsletter that will be a companion on the site. If you sign up for an account, you can even SAVE and LOAD your programs.

You can see an example of what it's capable of doing at the Real-World Benchmark, which gives some sample programs you can type in with the kiddos!

Dave

Our Real-World HTML5 Benchmark at ClubCompy had a Julia set running in the browser a full month ago!

It's not a fair comparison though that they're so much faster than us, our code runs out of a BASIC-like language called Tasty that runs ATOP JavaScript.

Dear Tim,

Please backport IE9 to Windows XP. My preciousss needs to run good on IE on XP, etc.

Thanks in advance,
Dave Woldrich
https://clubcompy.com/

My first attempt at a commercial website, CardMeeting, is built around a large, unsigned applet. Those "Grant, Deny?" dialog boxes are poison to anyone in the know, and I surely would never visit any site with them. Unsigned applets don't need any security warning dialog because they are untrusted and therefore will receive no privileged access to the user's system. Unsigned == heavily sandboxed. "Unsigned" sounds like a bad thing though, so that's something I could never tout to my users. But in reality, I was looking out for them! :D

I had a heck of a time figuring out how to get the CardMeeting applet jar packed up with scripts and making the applet "stream" data the way it does. Yeargh, I remember that pain. Anyhow, it makes me really sad that news like this may lead people to disable java applets; I think the unsigned form of applets is very powerful and much safer for average users than Flash ever was. I wish there was a way in the browser to disable only signed applets. Perhaps Oracle could bring the hammer down and go ahead and disable them by default in the next Java release.

My new website ClubCompy is 100% HTML+JavaScript. I wrote this whole simulated operating environment to teach kids to code with just the browser. I hope I don't start seeing people disable JavaScript on their browsers, then I'd be outta business!

Dave

Hi, I'm genuinely curious how the various browsers do on the benchmark.

Could Slashdotters please run it on multiple browsers and report how it does (plus, how what hardware you're running on.)

Thanks!
Dave Woldrich
ClubCompy.com