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Showing posts from October, 2023

Marxist programming

  I plan to write on technology and culture in this series of blog posts. This is the start of the discussion of the cultural parts of programming. The idea started with a joke during afternoon coffee at work, and then I made a speech on the matter at an internal conference, also as a joke. When I think about it, it deserves to be more than a joke, so I will dig into the subject. I was into politics when I was younger, which made me read some Marxist theory. I am not a Marxist by ideology, but I find his way of analysing society interesting. I usually present my political view as a Marxist Liberal, half to provoke, as liberals don't like Marxism and Marxists don't like liberals, but also halfway true: I share a lot of liberal values and don't like the autocratic ways of the Marxist countries. On the other hand, I think liberalism is naive in many ways, as the economic forces make a lot of people unfree. Freedom for the individuals is what I want. Freedom to live even in a c...

Once upon a time there was a young sourcerer

I started programming in BASIC during the 1980s and in many ways, it represented the transition from the domain of specialists to a broader audience, including hobbyists, students, and business professionals. BASIC's Accessibility: BASIC, an acronym for "Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code," was designed to be a user-friendly programming language. In the 1980s, this accessibility was crucial. Unlike the more complex languages of the time, such as Fortran or COBOL, BASIC was easy to learn and use, making it popular in educational settings and among first-time computer users. In Sweden, the Luxor ABC80 were introduced at some schools. My physics teacher was interested and got some for our school. To use them we had to do a course in digital circuits before we were allowed. I guess that was to filter out the students really interested. The Rise of Personal Computing: The 1980s saw the rise of personal computers, and BASIC played a pivotal role in this revo...