This book has been instrumental to revive my drive to program for the fun of it. However, not aimlessly. For fun but consciously knowing that it’s a way to teach yourself. To learn. To grow.

Simply reading about that machine, the Commodore 64, brought me back to childhood and spurred renewed enthusiasm in me. We had a C64 in our living room. I was a 5 years old boy when we were playing Arkanoid on our minuscule monitor. How I cherish those memories. My first interactions with a computer. No programming yet, but fun was definitely there.

It is all about a 10 Print¹ line of code that generates a pseudo-random succession of ‘\’ and ‘/’ which over time renders a maze-like illustration. Provided in the C64 manual, this has no other goal than to get a piece of art on screen. A recreational experience.

But it goes well beyond than just that one line of code. It’s about computing history, randomness, underground culture, and more.

Just a couple of highlights.

In 1959, one of the earliest computer programs written for fun–-an example of “recreational computing”-–depicted an experimenter’s maze.

About history intersecting with graphics programming.

Ken Perlin, one of the programmers for the graphics in Tron, expressed frustration with the clean look. Later, in 1983, he developed a technique called Perlin Noise to generate organic textures that have a random appearance event though they are fully controllable to allow for careful design.

The early times of programming languages design, and always with references to books and actors of that computing history. Sounds like an endless well to explore.

These concise little programs were written at least as early as the beginning of the 1960s. The language that was most famous for writing such programs was APL, designed by Kenneth Iverson using special (non-ASCII) notation. APL was first described in his 1957 book A Programming Language and was first implemented at IBM beginning in 1960.

It’s of course not only mentionning APL, the very title of this book is a BASIC line of code. We navigate in the history of efforts to make portable programming languages:

BASIC continued the evolution of high-level languages, building on some of what FORTRAN, Algol and other languages had accomplished: greater portability across platforms along with keywords and syntax that facilitated understanding the language and writing programs.

Back to the fun part. That’s a point developed all over this book. One that is not new. Another work referenced from the book:

In his 1972 book Man and the Computer, Kemeny defends programming and playing games and other “recreational” uses of the computer as important.

Another form of fun was how that thing, the C64, has been advertised in some places:

A Commodore 64 advertisement that was aired in Australia in 1985 provides evidence that BASIC was a central selling point. After the television spot showed bikini-clad women descending a waterslide and cut to a woman happily using a Commodore 64 in a retail store, it cut once again to a screenful of BASIC, and then to depict a boy programming in BASIC. The commercial suggests that computer programming was an obvious, important, and fun use of a home computer.

I found the ad on youtube:

The book is availabe in PDF format under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. All information available under https://10print.org/ (as well as a bunch of links to dig deeper, watch out for the rabbit hole!). That’s the version I’ve read but I would love to get a physical copy.

I most enjoyed this book.