jamesadrian wrote:
Can the frame of mind and directness of simple assembly languages be introduced into the wider computing market?
One idea I've read from computer history books is that there were two tribes who came to microcomputing: those who came from minicomputing and those who came from calculators. These days, there's at least one more tribe, which is those who came from gaming.
From minicomputing, we have people who like an operating system, a filing system, tools.
From calculators, we have people who want to string together simple operations and get some results.
From gaming, we have people who want to move pixels on a screen, and play music or at least get sounds.
(Of course that's an approximation, and we're several generations on from those days.)
Jim's ideas to me seem to have something in common with programming a programmable calculator: something direct, with not too many available operations and not too much extra syntax beyond that.
(When MCM introduced their desktop APL machine, their potential customers were happy to write programs in what is a very direct, but also very terse programming language, using only a one-line display. IBM also sold an APL-only machine, and then a dual-boot APL and Basic machine. It seems that Visicalc put paid to APL, as a much more friendly (but much heavier) solution to array-based calculations.)