Reviews for Dreams & schemes

The average rating for Dreams & schemes based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-06-10 00:00:00 Kitty Hopkins Four-and-a-half to five sevenths of a good book. The authors, (John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz), spend too much time hawking their own market failure of a commercial BASIC product, "True BASIC". Chapters one through three are an engaging history of the development of the language. Chapter 4 is an entertaining bitch-fest about the various transgressions committed by the BASIC dialects popular on the microcomputers of the day--the complaints are justified almost without exception. Chapter 6 is a long sales pitch about how True BASIC is comparable or superior to Logo, Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, and Ada. Chapters 5 and 7 are lengthy exhortations about disciplined and structured programming, with "before" and "after" (or "Street BASIC" and "True BASIC") examples. Sadly this sort of discussion is not as obsolete as it should be; the details differ, but coders still write poorly-structured code. It's interesting how unaware the authors were (in 1985) of C (or how they misjudged its long-term importance), and of the make-or-break importance of a useful and powerful suite of libraries to a language's success. I am not sure the authors' commercial BASIC venture could have succeeded under any circumstances that included Microsoft remaining in business. Perhaps they hoped their firm would be acquired by the 'Soft; this would explain the curious absence of explicit finger-pointing at the force they had to have known was far and away most responsible for the proliferation and sustenance of shitty BASICs. (QuickBASIC was a big improvement, but it came later.) Part of me wishes that I had read this book back in 1985 when it was published, as I assuredly had much to learn from its chapters on structured programming. (And it would have been nice to be aware of von Neumann's merge sort algorithm, explained in chapter 7, way back then. It was only forty years old at the time...) On the other hand, the BASICs I had to work with then and for the next several years were primitive compared to ANSI BASIC, let alone the authors' True BASIC product, so I might have been too frustrated to effectively absorb the material. A worthwhile addition to my retrocomputing shelf.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-02-22 00:00:00 William L. Kellerman This was a sobering reminder of the destruction of war.