[Coco] Re: philosphical ... discussions

[James Dessart]

On Thu, 7 Oct 2004, Charlie wrote:

> Well if you want new stuff, and have to write it yourself, then the CoCo is
> nothing more than nostalgia.

But what else would it be? Hacker nostalgia is a big pass time. And how is
that something that can be referred to as "nothing more than"?

I'm not directing my comments at you, but at the community in general.
There's a little too much, "Well I can't do it, so I'll wait for someone
else to." and not enough "That sounds like fun, I'll do it."

I agree with John that BASIC games can be good. What you have to
concentrate on there is making the content good, rather than making it do
something fantastic and new. The thing is, for those kinds of games, you
have to take the time to think a story through.

We can push the hardware all we want, but that doesn't make a good game
necessarily. Yes, everyone could learn assembly, and become GIME gurus,
but that's not going to happen. So you write something in BASIC that's
really cool. Then someone who knows assembly can turn it into something
that pushes the hardware.

The thing is, it's not just hardware and software skills that make a
computer community great, it's the creativity, the desire to explore.

In any case, I think we need more high level languages for the CoCo.
That's one of my big reasons for wanting to get gcc up to speed. once you
have the backend, gcc can use almost any language as the front end. Java,
objective-c, Ada, FORTRAN, COBOL, whatever your heart desires almost.

James