this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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retrocomputing

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[–] feoh@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Also, how would that 'weirdness' impact using the device in a teaching context?

[–] irdc@derp.foo 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

People would learn bad habits.

For example, due to parameter passing often being done via the zero page, recursion is unnecessarily hard on the 6502, whereas one could argue that recursion is one of the major skills to master for any programmer.

[–] richard_merren@mastodon.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@irdc @feoh All programmers need to learn recursion and fully understand it so when they encounter it in the wild they can properly analyze what it is doing and replace it with non-recursive code.

[–] irdc@derp.foo 2 points 1 year ago

A non-recursive recursive descent parser isn’t any easier to reason about.

[–] Draconic_NEO@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 1 year ago

They learn how to program in a more efficient way that makes better use of limited memory and CPU cycles. Which frankly is something modern programmers and game designers could very much benefit from considering how bloated and unoptimized much of modern software is, probably because they didn't need to think about whether computers can actually run it.