On 8 Feb, 2008, at 1:43 PM, Alain Pastor wrote, in his usual incisive  
way:

> As one goes along, we change our status from novice (gosub) to  
> advanced (fn) then expert (proc) programmer, but we must not forget  
> on that road that the BASIC language is aimed at beginners.

Thank you Alain!

Over the years, I've written some FB stuff that would make, and has  
made, most of you regular FB Listers laugh. Not an FN in sight;  
littered with laughable GOSUBs. Several of those programs have done  
some very serious calibration on a lot of very expensive new  
equipment we have manufactured. My business was to design and  
manufacture laser equipment, not write exotic Mac software dandified  
with arcane HIG implementations. I enjoy those 'dandifications' as  
well as anyone, but it was quite possible, as one of the beginners  
spoken of in the 'B' in BASIC, to write very functional programs . Is  
that still possible?

Several of you on this list have written exotic code for me, and I  
appreciate that code. But I also appreciated the facility with which  
a bozo such as I could write something at the near-idiot level, and  
have it work. It would never be, nor was it ever intended to become,  
commercial software. My vote is - and I've whined about this in the  
past - for a subset of The New FB suitable for The Idiot Programmer  
who needs to teach his Mac a new trick or two, and is content to be  
somewhere well behind the cutting edge of Macdom.

Look what came up, below, chosen by MacBrain... I'd rather write an  
innocent, childlike program than write nothing at all.
--
Ted Spencer
--
How much better is a person who does any innocent thing than he who  
does nothing...
(Samuel Johnston)