[comphist] Lost arts from the 8 bit days.

[Thomas D. <te...@cy...>]

Rob Landley wrote:
> Fitting the program you wanted to write into memory was always the big 
> challeng with the 8 bits.  It's the programming equivalent of haiku, 
> requiring its own kind of creativity and having its own kind of beauty.

Which was a large part of the fun too :)

> And it really does develop skills that come in handy later.  I used to do 
> entire java projects in about 15k, when similar implementations were 500k, 
> and they couldn't figure out how I was doing it and I couldn't imagine how 
> they could be so completely clueless.  (The ability to declare multiple 
> classes doesn't mandate it, and the ability to create multiple threads or 
> object instances does not require doing so either.  Duplication of code or 
> data is bad, but making a forest of "if" statements just so you can share 
> three lines doesn't always make sense either.  Think about what you're 
> actually doing, try to understand what the machine's doing, actually measure 
> things and measure the RIGHT things...  Sigh...)

I'm always getting in trouble because of thaose habits.
I try to make the code effecient, instead of writing it quickly.

Example. code to read 10,0000+ lines of text and map it to
a binary format. I started writing it read a line at a time
from the input, use dynamic allocation of the binary storage,
and make the memory footprint small. When that was takeing a while,
I was told just use a static store all in memory, and let the OS
handle it with swap. So I had static allocations of 2G.
Ended up having to rewrite it when it had to be used on smaller
memeory machines.

But the art of small code, using neat trick, like the unused bits
of one variable for bools and condition registers is not done now.
Imagine most x86 programmers trying to write code with just the
6502 register set (A, X and Y).

Most programmers today have zero understanding of what is
happening behind their code. How many C programmers know
what or how the printf() function works?

So instead whe get huge bloatware, and need more RAM, disk,
and ever faster CPUs to do the old stuff. I dislike most "modern"
games because there all flashy graphics and sound, and no real
game play. Thanks to MAME, I can still play Pac-Man, and Galaga.
Amazing that after nearly 20 years those games are still fun,
but the current games only last a few months. Or pull out you
Atari 2600 (VCS if you prefer) and play Pitfall or River Raid.
They are still playable, with only 4bit graphics.

	-Thomas