GoKawiilWhile perusing Jef Raskin’s documents from the early days of Apple (1979 predominately), I came across a curious one: a “calculator” language that Jef proposed.
What’s particularly interesting is that it’s presented in the context of programming languages. Its specification doesn’t really describe a general purpose programming language – the title is accurate in that it is a calculator language. But in context it seems implied that Jef had aspirations of turning it into something bigger. Something that might have been the programming language for the Macintosh (which turned out, instead, to be Pascal).
Furthermore, there’s an extensive addendum presenting Jef’s opinions on programming languages of the day – ALGOL, APL, BASIC, Cobol, Fortran, Lisp, Pascal, PL/1, SNOBOL – which I guess is what Jef felt were his ‘competition’ in some sense, or at least his predecessors; he clearly had aspirations towards creating a new language of his own. In time-honoured fashion, this is because he felt all existing languages weren’t good enough. 😆
Jef was especially not a fan of BASIC (which was the lingua franca at the time, for personal computers – ignoring assembly languages, at least) and didn’t mince words about it:
BASIC is a very weak language, and is being shored up in many ad hoc ways. Any student of programming languages can easily poke holes in it. Nonetheless, it will continue to be used for many years, which is a tribute to its environment, not its internal design. BASICs well-deserved popularity demonstrates that minimizing programmer effort and time is often more important, when it comes to purchasing a language, than the language’s features as described in the spirit of traditional computer science. Jef Raskin, The Apple Calculator Language Primer
He wasn’t wrong about its longevity. I wonder what he later thought (he lived until 2005) of Visual Basic, RealBasic, and all their derivatives…
❤️ My first commercial software was written in RealBasic. I still remember it fondly. RealBasic as a language, IDE, and set of standard libraries was simple and elegant. If a bit slow (oh, what we could do with it now with modern compilers or JITs!).
On Fortran, PL/1, and Pascal – the latter being used heavily on the Macintosh, until Mac OS X – he seemed… bitter? A little resentful of their success? Of them, he said:
As declared languages they are inherently poor at simulating human trains of thought. I am well aware of the advantages of declarations, and take joy at the improvement in control structures of, say Pascal over FORTRAN. But these are all improvements of a detailed, nit-picking sort. What languages should do is remove the nits, and minimize the detail you must think about when solving problems. What Pascal’s data structures, declarations, and control structures have done is to make those details more explicit, and thus cleaner. It is a real improvement, but unfortunately leans in the direction of discipline and rigidity.
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