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IanT Senior Member Joined: 29/11/2016 Location: United KingdomPosts: 132
Posted: 03:21pm 25 Jul 2026
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Yes! Absolutely Mick (and I had a Nascom 2!) :-)
Regards,
IanT
LeoNicolas Guru Joined: 07/10/2020 Location: CanadaPosts: 606
Posted: 04:49pm 25 Jul 2026
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I like to implement games with MMBasic out of sheer nostalgia. Basic was the first programming language I learned at the end of the 80s. Unfortunately I'm feeling the MMBasic a little fragmented, with multiple not compatible versions.
It is more convenient for me to implement my projects on my PC and running then on an emulator, and after completing the implementation, to move them to the real hardware. It is most because my projects are usually very complex, with multiple files, and long code. This is being a pain on the MMBasic ecosystem. I don't have a Windows machine and running the MMB4W on wine is not the best experience. MMB4L is still in development, but behind the Windows version. And both are way behind the MMBasic for the pico.
Python is a nice programming language, it is modern, and the emulator version is similar to the Pico 3 version. Edited 2026-07-26 02:49 by LeoNicolas
My apologies ... for the most part I lurk here, and rarely feel the need to respond to discussions. I am sorry that you guys are experiencing a crisis of faith. Let me give a couple of reasons why I use MMBasic. Number one is that as a human being, I want to program in a non-Internet connected, off-grid, and low power environment. If I need to make a small program change (maybe as simple as changing a constant), I don't want to have to boot an internet capable machine to do so. I want a self-hosting environment. That is, I want access to the hardware at a micro-controller level, with an editor, a local file system, and most importantly some mechanism of backup to removable media. My intention is to have my hardware running 24/7. This may be very difficult to understand for those connected to mains power. When you are using off-grid power, and in the depths of winter, the (say) 10W power requirement of a Pi-class processor will inevitably kill you. My Pico hardware down-clocked to 48MHz is more in the 15mA category. There are plenty of hardware choices for monitoring the hardware, without turning on a monitor. Micropython is not self-hosting. You can't break into the REPL loop. To write micopython code, the straightforward way is to run thonny on more capable hardware. This inevitably means that you are administering both the low-level hardware, and another computer with the development environment. And if you were doing that, you may as well be internet connected and write code in Rust. Further, I want to write elegant code. Code that I can come back to perhaps some years later, and pick up where I left off, because the code is so understandable. AI may be very capable, and in time could exceed the abilities of human programmers. But do you trust it? When it breaks its boundaries, what might it insert in your code without permission? It also adds another whole level of power dependency into the mix, at orders of magnitude greater power requirement, ie we are assuming gigawatt class power centers available in the background. Don't be too quick to adopt AI. It is fragile technology, and might not go the distance. Isn't the human brain in the 100W class? There is no shortage of human ingenuity and intelligence. Really, short of using it on the battlefield, I can't see the business model.
scruss Senior Member Joined: 20/09/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 110
Posted: 01:43am 26 Jul 2026
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Ctrl-C has always worked for me in MicroPython.
scruss Senior Member Joined: 20/09/2021 Location: CanadaPosts: 110
Posted: 01:56am 26 Jul 2026
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I'm a crap programmer too, but I really enjoy it. I don't consider it drudge work at all. I enjoy learning from what went wrong. As I have an exceptionally bad memory, I even enjoy re-implementing the same program that I'd forgotten I'd solved years ago.
I've tried prompt-based programming, but it produced code that needed careful debugging and testing, if it worked at all. For me, that ended up taking longer than writing from scratch. Only AI can deal with the problems that AI creates. Me, I'm very slow and very human. Much of my code is deliberately futile, but it's my code.
“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.” — Kurt Vonnegut
Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me.
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