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Why Can't We Put a BASIC On the Phone?
theodp writes "In the Sixties, we could put a man on the moon. Nowadays, laments jocastette, America's tech giants can't even put a BASIC on the phone. Woz managed to crank out a BASIC interpreter for the 6502 in the '70s. As did Bill Gates and Paul Allen. So, why — at a time when development has never been easier — can't Google, Apple, and Microsoft manage to support a free BASIC or other programming-for-the-masses development environment on desktops, laptops, tablets and phones?"
My limited experience with Android development showed using Java to be obtuse and downright obnoxious to do anything (at least without Eclipse, and even with it doing anything non-standard required digging through horrendous ant buildfiles). And, of course, without a REPL things were even more obnoxious. There is the android-scripting project, but it doesn't provide particularly exhaustive access to the platform.
We do, it's called JavaScript. With its shortcomings, it's still a better language than BASIC. There are BASIC interpreters written in JavaScript if you really want that.
BASIC is an awful language
You obviously never used BBC BASIC, which had procedures, functions, repeat until, do while, case, local variables, recursion, inline assembler... Hey, it still exists.
Yes, thanks for calling almost any programmer who started with BASIC a retard. When I was 7 years old I obviously should had went with ASM instead of something that was easily understandable and gave instant results, and hence motivated me to keep programming all the way to the current day.
You can't get BASIC for your phone for the same reason you can't get a reasonable BASIC for your average GNU/Linux distro. It's just not that good and it only teaches you bad habits, and in the end - it's just not useful. It's not that good language for the masses as it is advertised, and you can't do much in it.
Why not Python? It's a very easy language in which you can write something significant with the least effort and it has a very steep learning curve. It's easy, it's powerful, and if you ever plan to become a real programmer - it teaches you good programming habits.
That said, I've added CHDK to my Canon camera, and it allows you to extend it with UBASIC scripts. It's one case where a BASIC variant is actually useful, because it's rather easy to implement, and it's used mainly for tasks that are quite suitable for it in their extreme simplicity. Can you give an example - what do you like to script in BASIC on your phone? Maybe you can support BASIC in your app in a way similar to CHDK!
The vulgar one has a point though. There are classes of software that are aimed at audiences that wouldn't want them if they had the skills to write them on their own.
Do you think that most children's games would exist if they had to be written by kids?
BASIC is this kind of problem. I suspect that nobody who ever wrote a BASIC interpreter had a practical use for it themselves. Maybe during the Apple II / TRS80 days, but certainly not more recently than that. In recent times, it's a tool for less experienced programmers to learn with and solve very simple problems, not a tool someone who could write software would employ to solve a practical problem.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
Exactly right. Anyone who has the skills to write a BASIC interpreter will also be someone who thinks BASIC is a POS, and won't have any interest at all in doing such a thing without a handsome paycheck to compensate them for that time lost. There's no shortage of free and open-source language compilers/interpreters: C, C++, Java, PHP, Perl, Python, Erlang, etc. Some of these have some corporate backing (probably the Java compilers), but many are totally free projects done by volunteers. But obviously, these volunteers are working on compilers for languages they actually like and would want to use themselves, not languages they would sneer at in derision.
So if someone wants a BASIC interpreter for phones, the only way it's going to happen is if they do it themselves (not likely as pointed out above), or if they pay someone else to do it. As that effort is non-trivial, it would more realistically take a corporate project to do it, and that's only going to happen if some company or companies think they can profit off that effort somehow. I seriously doubt there's enough aspiring BASIC programmers out there demanding BASIC on their phones (with wallets open to pay for it) to justify this project for any company. Anyone who really wants to do some serious programming on their phone already has the tools available to them (i.e., Java on Eclipse), and won't want to be hamstrung by a crappy language (Java's crappy too, but relative to BASIC it's wonderful).
Alternately, the programming community could go back to its philosophical roots, from the time when it was programming rather than developing, and realize that an intelligent culture is fostered by the democratization of coding. "Normal" people cannot learn C without a teacher. These are the kids we always hear and talk about on /. who, despite not having the talent to ever become great mathematicians or comp-sci oracles, can still benefit from the practice of well-ordered thought that a basic (woah) understanding of coding provides.
Today's programmers need to be less like the financial industry jackasses of today and more like the programmers of yesterday. You don't need to do everything for a paycheck. Sometimes when you do something, it's for the people, and for the future.