[Tutor] Newbie Anxiety

[Terry Kemmerer]

> Ah, memory lane time again :-)
> Oh, you had advanced BASIC - it allowed nested for loops! :-)
> My first BASIC only allowed for loops that could be written in a single
> line...Anything more complex you had to call a subroutine with GOSUB.
> 

Ha! Yes! As Monte Python would say, "Well......It got better!"


> Yes, I remember those days, in fact 48K was quite generous!
> My original box only had 16K RAM and 16K ROM for the OS and interpreter.
> 

The OSI "machine" I learned BASIC on, had 8K of usable RAM (I could have
bought it with 4K RAM instead, 
but I splurged) and I used a radio shack cassette tape to store my
programs and play them back into the 
CORE. Speaking of ROM, I remember setting there in front of the TV
screen, thinking this means if they 
upgrade the OS, I am going to have to throw away the second most
populated board in the machine! 
(The biggest board was the nearly empty BUS back plane board.  


> You had Disks?!! We were using loops of punched tape...
> 

OSI led the micro computer revolution in technical innovation. We were
years ahead of the other microcomputer 
manufacturers. Of course, at the onset, WE CHEATED. (Cheating is
natural...sometimes...) We didn't wait for the 
little hard drives or small floppies that were priced right. Instead, we
immediately adapted, and used the more 
expensive Industrial components available for the REAL COMPUTERS of our
day, which were all around us already. 
This move immediately PUSHED US FORWARD in OS development. So, early on,
we had the option of 8 inch industry standard dual floppies, a 40 MB and
80 MB Winchester hard drives (they were very big and very heavy), and
OSI quickly added time sharing capability to the OS, which opened up a
whole new level of capability and opportunity, then distributed
processing, then Multiprocessing, etc. while the rest of the micro
computer world lagged behind us. We were the first in 
the microcomputer world to do all these things. In fact, OSI created and
marketed the first SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER which they called the PC.
(That's right. IBM stole the name from OSI. It is very true, the victor
writes the history.) 

So, with these innovations our OS and BASIC were pushed for increased
capability. This, of course, was all done on the 
8 bit 6502 chip which had the advantage of pipe line processing. So,
while the 6502 was seen as a gaming 
chip by the world, running video arcades in the mall, we were running
full blown timeshare computer systems on it. It was only natural that
later OSI jumped to the Motorola 68,000 series chip which had pipe line
capability also. Each step from time sharing forward, gave us orders of
magnitude of capability over our peers and bigger and bigger teeth to
bite IBM with. It was a magical time......full of wonderful risks. Ha Ha
Ha


> And here we have another advanced feature. Our BASIC didn't renumber
> GOTO or GOSUB statements, you had to do that manually. Thats why we
> used a lot of GOSUB but very few GOTO. And SUBs were all given 1000
> lines each to minimise risk of renumbering...
> 

Yes. Our Basic was very advanced for its time. When Steve Jobs began
doing his Apple thing with real 
money, he came back to OSI, and wanted to purchase "rights" for the
stuff he had written for us. The factory 
made it's second biggest mistake by not SHARING the OS and the BASIC
with Apple. That would have 
put both Apple and OSI on the same team against IBM, and made all the
software being developed on their 
6502 platform run on ours also and viceversa. Oh? What was the first
biggest mistake? The factory turned 
down the wall street guys who wanted to take them public,  and those
same brokers went to Apple next, 
and took them public instead.

Ooops!


> Depends on how you measure excellence. A lot of excellent software has
> been written by companies that went bust. The software was sufficiently
> excellent to survive and be bought out or just made publicly available as
> open source. So excellence can also be measured on how long lived the
> software is regardless of how long lived be the commercial body that created
> it.
> 

Essentially, I agree with you completely from the lifetime viewpoint of
software. From the productivity 
business point of view, I would have said it differently, but we both
would have ended up with the same 
goal. No one floats far on thin ice. 


> But I've fortunately never been limited to one language, even on my most
> primitive machines I've had recourse to assembler, and usually some kind
> of scripting environment. Only on very early PCs, where BASIC was the OS
> was I so restricted - and PEEK/POKE were my friends :-).
> 

Ha! Yes. We used PEEK/POKE also in our BASIC STATEMENTS, but soon left
that behind. 

Before we went into business, however, as we surveyed the lay of the
land, and we saw people 
laboriously toggling programs in binary into Emsai and Altair machines
by flipping switches, and 
we saw people programming in assembler, and we looked into that, but the
bottom line for my thinking 
was, THIS IS ALL TOO SLOW. And slow meant that RESPONSE SOLUTIONS to
changing customer 
needs would come far too late, and probably much later than hitting the
iceberg. This was a major 
reason we latched onto BASIC and stay there. Later, we hired people from
time to time to create 
utilities that we could employ via BASIC, that were written in Assembler
or C later yet, but that 
represented a very minute part of our stuff. Things like faster GARBAGE
COLLECTION routines, etc.

Which brings us back to why I have picked PYTHON. It is fast to do
development work in, and 
excellent enough to leave working code as PYTHON, rather than writing it
into something else 
later. Further, I don't like to repeat myself, and do things more than
once. When I finish something, 
I want it to be done, and get on with life, and the next step. The fact
is, at my age, I am looking for 
a way NOT TO EXPAND past Python into any other language. I want one
excellent language to 
concentrate my investment time into which will then magnify my skills
learned, and let me apply 
them and my language in any situation I run into on my way to the bank.
I am looking for ONE 
LANGUAGE to get me from scratch to a finished business in play......a
ZERO DOLLAR BUDGETING 
PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRAMMING SPECIALIZATION, if you get my drift. That
means that language 
must be versatile and excel in the majority of areas I will encounter,
whatever they may be, and at 
least adequate for those "other" areas where few have tread with the
language before. Python sure 
looks like it fits in that class of animal from where I am
standing....of course, I am looking from a long 
distance in time, from where I left the industry.......but still.....I
also trust my instincts. And I have a 
very strong feeling about Python. I would put money on it. In fact, I am
going to do just that.

I intend to completely automate this business as close to 100% as
possible, letting it do the accounting, 
banking, etc. (either hand writing those packages or integrating them
from what is available using PYTHON like glue), 
and put the applicable portions of it on the web. (And no, I have been
out of the computer world inventing strange 
devices for quite some time, so, I have no idea which software parts go
where yet. Like, is it possible to safely put EVERYTHING on the web
site, like automated accounting of the books, etc? ) 

--And I have decided to let the LANGUAGE take me there, much the way you
recommend a bit later in this 
letter, where you say to trust the language. I do. From my prior
experience I understand that THE WAY OF 
THE LANGUAGE is everything. Right now, my goal is to actually grasp that
about Python. Ha.

My assessment is, PYTHON is the most probable SINGLE path language that
has the potential to carry me to 
my goal from where it is located on the advancing time line of events,
and if this is so, I want to ride it, as a single 
language ride, it greatly minimizes my learning curve and investment
time. And since I am business 
orientated, it isn't about the intellectual, although that is always
great to have, it is about getting from here 
to there efficiently, and being able to respond quickly to what I didn't
think of when it bites me 
in the ass out of the blue, and getting the action going in the market,
and then being able to quickly fine tune 
or even change directions in my code in real time (business real time),
or as near that as possible. And that 
all appears to be in the nature of PYTHON. This is the same way I picked
my computer and programming horse 
in the beginning of the microcomputer revolution. Somethings are still
inherent in the situation. In the end, 
the language and the subsequent code created, are just tools to an
end.........although I will probably burn 
incense at night in front of the Python Bible..........just in case.

So, my goal will be, regardless of what lanugage any packages are
written in that I might use, to do all my own work, 
whatever that turns out that I need to do, from scratch to final website
business, in PYTHON. Does it sound like 
it can be done?


> > only real concern has been in how the flow of python works for the WHOLE
> > PROGRAM FLOW, and you all have help me a lot here.......and I really
> 
> One of the things that some folks find hard is divorcing themselves from 
> that
> old line by line way of thinking. Modern languages can seem a little like
> black magic at times(*) - especially when you start programming with 
> objects.
> The trick is to trust the language and just believe it will work! :-)
> 
> (*)I'm having the same problem right now with the JSP Tomcat/Struts
> framework where all sorts of magical things just seem to happen. I keep
> fighting my desire to go trawl through the source code to see what's going
> on. 


Ha! I know that instinct well....


> Then I tell myself  ' just trust in the force Luke...'


I will take your advice! Thanks. Another good one is, "STAY ON TARGET!"

Anyway, I am generally not this chatty. And I will try to keep my future
questions brief. But now that I am 
working my way back into the computer world, it is good to have found
Python, as I feel I recognize it, even 
from a distance. I know I have a long ways to go....

Thanks,

Terry
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