Re: help with transfferring software to an Apple IIe

[mjmahon@aol.com (Michael J. Mahon)]

Jeff Blakeney wrote:

<snip>
>It it quite difficult to learn to program on a PC and you need a
>fairly hefty PC to run the current development environments that you
>would have to learn to be able to gain any sort of possibility of
>getting a job from it.  Even if you do learn one of these modern
>environments, most places won't hire a programmer who doesn't have
>some sort of formal education and even then, you need to know their
>particular development environment.
>
>I think it would be far more likely that someone would be able to
>handle learning to program on an Apple II than they would on a PC.
>The PC would just get frustrating while the Apple II, being so much
>simpler and easier to deal with, would make it easier for them to
>learn enough to actually get something written and possibly get them
>interested in learning more.  At that point they may want to move to
>PC programming but to try and learn from scratch on a PC would be a
>nightmore, in my opinion.  (By the way, I am a Windows programmer and
>I do my best to avoid all the annoying, bloated, unintuitive
>development environments that are out there.)

While this is certainly true for Windows programming (as it is for
programming in _any_ GUI environment) it is not true if the level
of programming aspiration is the same as with the Apple II.

Running GWBASIC on a PC (in a DOS window, of course) is
quite comparable to an Applesoft environment.

QuickBasic is a little step up, and Turbo Pascal or Turbo C would
be nice "next language" choices.

It is not necessary to deal with a GUI to learn programming, though
any commercial programmer (outside the embedded space) would
need those skills.

There needs to be some environment where a person without
programming experience can discover what a "variable" and
a "subroutine" are without investing a lot of money.  Since
PCs are virtually ubiquitous, and have many simple language
systems available, they make a fine platform for an introduction.
In fact, most people who would be interested in learning about
programming probably already are using a PC for standard tasks.

-michael

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