John Lindal’s Blog

Scripting vs Coding

Jeff Atwood’s latest blog, A Scripter at Heart, got me thinking. A colleague of mine recently expressed the same sentiments, namely that he preferred the instant gratification of a Basic interpreter. Looking back, I was the opposite. Yes, it was painful to switch from Applesoft Basic to FORTRAN (on a Mac, no less — Absoft had a very clever hack for integrating with MacOS), but the reason I never looked back was that by the time I switched in my senior year in high school, I was writing programs that were so large and complicated that they didn’t even fit in the available 48K on my Apple ][+. I was using chain to preserve the data whenever the program needed to load a different code segment. You can imagine how desperately I needed real subroutines instead of GOSUB! So when I could compile a complete program into one unit and get compile-time checking to make sure I was calling each subroutine correctly, I was in heaven. Besides, the pain of switching from a command input application model to an event driven application model so heavily outweighed any pain induced by the need for compilation and linking that I don’t think I actually noticed

And by the time I switched to Think C and its object model, I was again desperate, because the complexity had long since outgrown the procedural model…