{"id":999,"date":"2005-01-11T22:10:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-11T22:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2005\/01\/11\/best-beginners-programming-language-an-aside-to-alec-muffetts-dropsafe-posting\/"},"modified":"2005-01-11T22:10:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-11T22:10:00","slug":"best-beginners-programming-language-an-aside-to-alec-muffetts-dropsafe-posting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2005\/01\/11\/best-beginners-programming-language-an-aside-to-alec-muffetts-dropsafe-posting\/","title":{"rendered":"Best beginner&#8217;s programming language: an aside to Alec Muffett&#8217;s Dropsafe posting."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A week ago Alec Muffett <a href=\"http:\/\/www.crypticide.com\/dropsafe\/articles\/computing\/post20050104170322.html\">posed a question<\/a> as to what the best beginners&#8217; programming language would be on his blog. He suggested that BASIC was a no-hoper as there are no good, freely distributable BASIC languages available, especially if you want a full procedural form.<\/p>\n<p>Well, I think I&#8217;ve just found a possible answer to that problem. Admittedly, it&#8217;s a bit more than a pure language, it&#8217;s more of an interpreter running under a virtual machine. It&#8217;s freely distributable source, or at least the virtual machine is.<\/p>\n<p>So, what is this wonderful thing?<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.geocities.com\/SiliconValley\/Bay\/2602\/uqlx.html\">UQLX<\/a> Sinclair QL emulator which includes the excellent Sinclair SuperBASIC interpreter. Not only this but it&#8217;s been extended to add TCP\/IP support, direct access to the UNIX filesystem and displayless scripting. And, of course, people can always download and run QL software or use it as a Motorola 680&#215;0 development system with a downloaded assembler.<\/p>\n<p>I freely admit that this is not at all an object oriented programming language which Alec thinks people should start with. Then again, OOP programming languages aren&#8217;t the most appropriate language type for all things, especially if you&#8217;re prototyping certain scientific problems where program structure is less important than the thought process when developing a technique. (However, it seems like a GoodIdea&trade; for big programming projects and those where structure is very important.)<\/p>\n<p>I would be interested in any comments people might have with my opinions, be it with UQLX or programming languages in general.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A week ago Alec Muffett posed a question as to what the best beginners&#8217; programming language would be on his blog. He suggested that BASIC was a no-hoper as there are no good, freely distributable BASIC languages available, especially if &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/2005\/01\/11\/best-beginners-programming-language-an-aside-to-alec-muffetts-dropsafe-posting\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-999","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1Kvvs-g7","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lingula.org.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}