Many years ago I was playing around with an Acorn Archimedes (RISC OS) anagram application. It wouldn't let me create anagrams of the programmer's name, William Tunstall-Pedoe.
It was called !Gravity on the Acorn Archimedes. It was written in BASIC (and possibly some assembler) and I remember it being a popular game at school to hack - change the number of planets, acceleration rate etc.
About three years ago I knocked up a quick BBC Basic program (RPCemu/RISCOS) to play around with some dithering algorithms; I ended up painting the results:
Project politics. We did run benchmarks and Oracle's ORDER BY clearly came out ahead, but the analyst espousing bubble sort was entrenched and dismissed all benchmarks as special cases.
I was thinking the same thing; my initial thoughts were Jeff Minter or James Hague, but Google is not showing anything relevant.
It might simply be that a common first-time benchmark exercise for programmers moving from BASIC to assembler is to fill the screen with characters or pixels. I have a sneaking suspicion I did the same too.
Supposing you could travel back in time and give your earlier self a book (or at least, a few sheets of paper) that described 'good programming' (e.g. using GOSUB, in this context) - would you do it?
Would you have been better off 'doing things right' from day one, versus experimenting and muddling through?
