In 2008 I was in high school and wrote a TI-BASIC tutorial in German [0] on my blog that became by far the most popular thing I wrote - maybe on par with my post about how to fix a quest bug in Skyrim by teleporting Delphine.
I was a bit mad back then that people for some reason appreciated those posts more than many very deep teenager ramblings about politics/philosophy :D
There‘s HP calculator guys and TI guys. Around the age of 17 I spent lots of time programming my HP28s calculator in a Forth like language that had symbolic mathematics, lots of ideas from Scheme (closures, functions as first class arguments, recursion). It felt like magic dealing with concepts I hadn’t seen in the C compiler on my Amiga or later in Turbo Pascal. But I saw these concepts later in Mathematica and was familiar.
I had programmed games, complex 3d visualisations (super slow but oh well), and was totally fascinated by what this device could do.
I received the TI-83+ manual on the first day of high school and read it back-to-back that same day.
Subsequent math classes, I started by writing a BASIC problem to solve the type of math problem we were given.
I can't decide if I got really good at solving those math problems by solving them generally once, or really bad at solving those math problems for never having solved them more than once or twice by hand while writing the program.
Those programs were very inefficient, and you could code the TI-83+ in assembly, but it required uploading the code via cable. I recall being able to play small internet-downloadable network games with two TI-83+ connected. I never got around to writing any games myself.
Completely off-topic, but I recall hearing that Boris spent some time in Japan before Anthropic, learning to make miso paste the traditional way while living there. Interesting to see that he's been interested in lacto-fermentation for decades now.
For those souls loosing their skills to the easiest to adopt technology ever created... agentic development works for him because he KNOWS what he is doing in the first place!
I love seeing everyone share their stories if learning on a TI-8x.
My school recommended the 83+ but I ended up with an 85, probably because it was on sale or something. This meant I couldn't share games that all the kids had in their 83 so I got my start by copying them by hand and trying to figure out the syntax differences by guessing. After one of those I was able to start making my cheater programs and aced geometry because of it.
I got a TI83 in 4th grade and I realized programming is how you made video games and I decided "ok I'm going to learn to program"
I read the whole manual's programming section but couldn't make heads or tails of it. It assumed you knew basic logic/programming and mostly explained functionality/syntax.
Then in 5th grade my friend who was 3 years older was like "hey look I made a story in my calculator" and it was this big choose your own adventure story. He showed me how to use goto, how to display text, and a function for multiple choice user input + goto. I was in business!
I wrote my own story but had a section where I wanted to do different things if you had gotten an item already so I had to program the whole story twice and only enter the second version from the option where you get the item.
I tried writing a more complicated story with more items but the duplication was insane 3 items required 3!=6 copies of common locations. I was like "this is dumb there's got to be a better way" and I looked at the manual again and now I had enough of a framework to understand "OH a variable is whether you have the red key, why didn't they just put that?"
The Basic was SO BAD that I had to learn Z80 assembly to make anything good. Really.
No sane Basic should leak stack memory just because you exited an "If-Then" block without reaching the corresponding "End". Yes that's a thing. If you use "If-Then" and the code never reaches the "End" because you used "Goto" to leave the block, a few bytes are leaked every time that happens, and eventually the program stops with "ERR: Memory". You needed to use "If" then "Goto" on the immediate next line, and that would avoid the leak. Exiting the program or stopping it will give you back all the leaked memory, including seeing that error.
Then you have the lack of actual subroutines or functions. All you can do is call into a separate program, and return things by putting them in specific variables. But the Basic doesn't even have "Gosub".
But isn't that just how the world works? As kid I got ERR:MEMORY allot while trying to create games. It was until I started to read a C book which said "We will not use goto in this book. It is a dangerous function that can lead to memory leaks. For example if you jump out of a function, said function will stay in memory because it never finishes." That was the light bulb moment for my TI-Basic problems.
For me the bad part is that the official TI-83 manual has a code example for the GETKEY function that is using GOTO to jump out of a loop.
That wasn't "leaking stack memory" except in a very literal sense: the BASIC language keeps a stack of the control structures you're inside, so that when you hit an "End" or "Else" statement it knows where to go next. This "stack" of control structures isn't lexically scoped; it's dynamic, based on what control flow commands you've hit. So yes, if you use "Goto" to set up a situation where you're hitting "Then" over and over without ever hitting a corresponding "Else" or "End", the control flow stack will just keep getting deeper and deeper. That's not a "leak" per se: all those "Then" structures are still there, waiting for their "End"s, and will do the natural thing if you give their "End"s to them — even somewhere someone used to lexically scoped languages wouldn't expect. Sometimes you can do cool things with this.
(I should add that the first image on that page shows one neat effect of non-lexicality: you can put an "Else" statement as the body of an "If", so that it's skipped when the "If"'s condition is false.)
Ah yes, my first love. I remember creating a quiz game based on greek mythology, and a little RPG where I realized the power of exponential functions by wrecking my power curve.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] threadIn 2008 I was in high school and wrote a TI-BASIC tutorial in German [0] on my blog that became by far the most popular thing I wrote - maybe on par with my post about how to fix a quest bug in Skyrim by teleporting Delphine.
I was a bit mad back then that people for some reason appreciated those posts more than many very deep teenager ramblings about politics/philosophy :D
[0]: https://archive.haukeluebbers.de/2008/12/ti-basic-tutorial-1...
I had programmed games, complex 3d visualisations (super slow but oh well), and was totally fascinated by what this device could do.
Subsequent math classes, I started by writing a BASIC problem to solve the type of math problem we were given.
I can't decide if I got really good at solving those math problems by solving them generally once, or really bad at solving those math problems for never having solved them more than once or twice by hand while writing the program.
Those programs were very inefficient, and you could code the TI-83+ in assembly, but it required uploading the code via cable. I recall being able to play small internet-downloadable network games with two TI-83+ connected. I never got around to writing any games myself.
https://github.com/dzoba/ti-89-raycasting-with-z
My school recommended the 83+ but I ended up with an 85, probably because it was on sale or something. This meant I couldn't share games that all the kids had in their 83 so I got my start by copying them by hand and trying to figure out the syntax differences by guessing. After one of those I was able to start making my cheater programs and aced geometry because of it.
I read the whole manual's programming section but couldn't make heads or tails of it. It assumed you knew basic logic/programming and mostly explained functionality/syntax.
Then in 5th grade my friend who was 3 years older was like "hey look I made a story in my calculator" and it was this big choose your own adventure story. He showed me how to use goto, how to display text, and a function for multiple choice user input + goto. I was in business!
I wrote my own story but had a section where I wanted to do different things if you had gotten an item already so I had to program the whole story twice and only enter the second version from the option where you get the item. I tried writing a more complicated story with more items but the duplication was insane 3 items required 3!=6 copies of common locations. I was like "this is dumb there's got to be a better way" and I looked at the manual again and now I had enough of a framework to understand "OH a variable is whether you have the red key, why didn't they just put that?"
No sane Basic should leak stack memory just because you exited an "If-Then" block without reaching the corresponding "End". Yes that's a thing. If you use "If-Then" and the code never reaches the "End" because you used "Goto" to leave the block, a few bytes are leaked every time that happens, and eventually the program stops with "ERR: Memory". You needed to use "If" then "Goto" on the immediate next line, and that would avoid the leak. Exiting the program or stopping it will give you back all the leaked memory, including seeing that error.
Then you have the lack of actual subroutines or functions. All you can do is call into a separate program, and return things by putting them in specific variables. But the Basic doesn't even have "Gosub".
Also, it's very very slow.
For me the bad part is that the official TI-83 manual has a code example for the GETKEY function that is using GOTO to jump out of a loop.
See subsection 2.1 in https://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/145/14542.htm...
(I should add that the first image on that page shows one neat effect of non-lexicality: you can put an "Else" statement as the body of an "If", so that it's skipped when the "If"'s condition is false.)
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer
I just love opening a page, and it is not vomited with claude's aesthetics.
* A quadratic formula program, which outputs the number of roots and the x-intercepts upon the user inputting the values of A, B, and C.
* A fighting game, with health, a store, different enemies, weapons, armor, etc, with graphics and animation.
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