On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 05:03:47PM -0500, Graham Fawcett wrote:
> The CL community has a "My Road to Lisp" meme, where CL users write up a
> quick story on how they "arrived". I'd *love* to hear people's My Road to
> Chicken stories.
A little painful to admit, but I started out with BASIC on the C64,
There's nothing embarrassing about that! Unless you mean that it's a sign of your advanced age! ;-)
I started with BASIC on a Commodore PET when I was about 14. The first computer I owned was a Commodore 64 -- I detasseled corn for a summer to earn the cash. It was a *wonderful* machine, and I learned a lot of languages on it: BASIC, COMAL, Forth, Logo and 6502 assembler.
Forth and Logo were revelations. Whatever strange things they did to my brain have never really been undone. I remembered the 'head' and 'tail' concepts from my adolescent Logo experiences; when I saw them much later in Lisp and Scheme, I had a very strange feeling of deja vu.
The 6502 was the only CPU I ever really programmed assembly for. I had read about cellular automata (probably Conway's Game of Life, and probably in a Martin Gardner book) and managed to get a CA engine written in assembly that was fast enough to run a game at a decent speed. It even had an opcode system for describing the rules of the CA games. Not bad for a naive, pre-Internet teenager! I wish I still had that code, but the audio-cassette tape it was stored on has long since vanished.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Peter. ;-)
Graham