Are folks using chat-style models for programming? I get tons of value from copilot-style tab-complete AI, but I can't wrap my head around how prompt-driven AI can be useful. Unless maybe I needed to script in a language I wasn't familiar with or something..
When I've got useful help from a chat prompt, it's usually been in situations when I knew you could to task X in language Y but I needed help with the actual syntax.
When I've got useful help from a chat prompt, it's usually been in situations when I knew you could to task X in language Y but I needed help with the actual syntax.
Regular old duckduckgo can also do that.
Q has both in-line and chat style. I find in-line suggestions distracting. Its right a lot, but it's forcing me to think about it every few seconds while typing, which I don't like and the controls are awkward. It's never been clear to me what I push to ignore it and I end up bringing up some other menu or deleting part of my text and just getting the prompt again when I type the next letter.
I like the chat style because I get to express my intent.
BASIC Co-Inventor Thomas Kurtz Has Passed Away
I've had a 34+ year career writing software that started with learning to program in BASIC on my Commodore 64.
BASIC Co-Inventor Thomas Kurtz Has Passed Away
I've had a 34+ year career writing software that started with learning to program in BASIC on my Commodore 64.
A shame, I started with Atari BASIC on the 800 with a cartridge.
I started with Logo but BASIC on the family Atari 800 was my first real programming language.
We all started by modifying that to make the explosions bigger, right?
muraii wrote:
We all started by modifying that to make the explosions bigger, right?
I first modified a d&d based dungeon crawler to roll only 6's when making new characters. It was a Telengard/DND port to BASIC, I think.
muraii wrote:
We all started by modifying that to make the explosions bigger, right?
I never modded it but played a/the version that had gravity as an input.
We all started by modifying that to make the explosions bigger, right?
Not me. Fun fact: the pointer to the banana sprite and the pointer to the head sprite work the same way.
When I started programming in BASIC (in the 80s) it was because I wanted to create my own Rogue game. Epyx Rogue was my family's favorite game at the time. Pretty sure I didn't manage to make anything good until I switched to Turbo Pascal and QuickBASIC.
I made many games over the decades since then but making games was always a hobby and not a profession. I got into distributed systems and data processing in University and my career has continued in that direction. Now, oddly enough, I work at Microsoft Gaming but I still don't make games. Game studios are one of the main customers of my work so I get to interact with them quite a bit tho.
My earliest project I recall was a “database” written in BASIC with a password check (against a hard-coded value) that if failed caused a jail cell to render (slowly) on the screen. The database housed information about my superhero team, Delta R.E.D. (“Reserve Earth Defense”).
My earliest BASIC games were like Atari's Adventure. Think a square you could move around with the joystick. Eventually I moved on to trying to make a game like Ultima where the graphics were character glyphs that I'd modified using PEEK and POKE statements. I never finished one of those games. The first "finished" games I made were Infocom-like text adventures, still in BASIC, with a custom parser. One of these was a Planetfall ripoff I submitted as a class project in my middle school programming class.
Edit: In fact I consider my work on the Atari 800/130XE to be so foundational that I made a new avatar to feature a reference to it prominently.
Found the computer games programming books I remembered borrowing from the library in 2nd grade to learn BASIC on the Commodore 64 online for free.
https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2016/02/usborne-releases-1980s-coding-books-as-free-pdfs/
Someone at work has just pointed out that Advent of Code 2024 is coming in hot - about 100 hours away as I write this.
Yep. Sunday. Looking forward to it. I usually flame out sometime in Xmas week. A combination of difficulty and time available usually does me in.
Also have to teach them ctrl-x, ctrl-c
Just want to say I'm enjoying this year's Advent of Code so far - nice puzzles as always, and no unreasonable timesinks so far. Though I have a feeling that today's might be polarizing to some.
Also enjoying the friendly competition with jontra on the leaderboard. (I might have an unfair advantage since the puzzles unlock at 2pm for me, but then sometimes that's a disadvantage if I have a meeting I can't code through).
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