I made a thing

Everyone doing such amazing stuff and I'm here with my Minesweeper for the calculator...

First rant: but I'm so triggered and everyone needs a break from all the EU and PC rants.

It's time to defend JavaScript. That's right, the best frikin language in the universe.

Features:
incredible async code (await/async)
universal support on almost everything connected to the internet
runs on almost all platforms including natively
dynamically interpreted but also internally compiled (like Perl)
gave birth to JSON (you're welcome ppl who remember that the X in AJAX stood for XML)

All these people ranting about JS don't understand that JS isn't frikin magic. It does what it needs to do well.

If you're using it for compute-heavy machine learning, or to maintain a 100k LOC project without Typescript, then why'd you shoot yourself in the foot?

As a proud JS developer I gotta scroll through all these posts gushing over the other languages. Why does nobody rant about using Python for bitcoin mining or Erlang to create a media player?

Cuz if you use the wrong tool for the right job, it's of course gonna blow up in your face.

For example, there was a post claiming JS developers were "scared" of multithreading and only stick in their comfort zone. Like WTF when NodeJS came out everything was multithreaded. It took some brave developers to step out of the comfort zone to embrace the event loop.

For a web app, things like PHP and Node should only be doing light transforms between the database information and HTML anyways. You get one thread to handle the server because you're keeping other threads open to interface with databases and the filesystem. The Nexus.js dev ranting on all us JS devs and doesn't realize that nobody's actual web server is CPU bound because of writing HTML bodies, thats why we only use 1 thread. We use other worker threads to do the heavy lifting (yes there is a C++ bridge look it up)

Anyways TL;DR plz respect JS developers we're people too. ES7 is magic and please don't shit on ES3 or we'll start shitting on the Python 2-3 conversion (need to maintain an outdated binary just cuz people leave out ()'s in their print statements)

Or at least agree that VB.NET is an abomination and insult to the beauty that is TI-84 BASIC

for your next edition of "TI's constantly been smoking crack since the 80s and has no intention of ever stopping":

the TI-8x calculators have a hardware buffer and an OS-provided buffer for screen data, effectively being an "immediate" buffer in hardware, to be displayed next VBlank, and a "slower" buffer, being what's copied to the "immediate" buffer when the OS decides it's time to update the screen. All well and good, maybe a little weirdly done but all in all makes sense. (You can even define a third buffer in RAM if you need to triple-buffer your shit.)

The problem arises when you use TI-BASIC and try to draw to the screen:
If you do something like, say, draw a circle, you'll notice that it's visibly drawn to the screen one pixel at a time. However, looking through what bits of the SDK I can find, the OS' "draw circle" assembly routine *doesn't update the immediate buffer!*

This means that, in TI-BASIC, the "draw circle" routine doesn't use the ACTUAL circle-drawing routine the OS provides, but instead individually calculates and plots a pixel, then updates the hardware buffer (an ENTIRE 768 bytes are copied EVERY TIME) and waits for VBlank to pass before repeating for the next one. In other words, it's deliberately slow as fuck.

Why? All the drawing commands, outside of like 2 or 3, do this. Why would you deliberately slow down the process of drawing to the screen on a system that you KNEW would be popular for people to code on???

my friend was bragging how he could program a game on his TI-84 calculator
it was just a (buggy) random number game
I told him good job, I program a bit, too
he said "yeah? what do u do?"
I said "I made two apps"
he walked away
I thanked god

At age 6 I was deemed as an idiot savant. Coding is boring for me now. Age 7-10: I worked for an underground agency that was focused on harvesting people's organ data from MRI machines to predict the economic future. 10-14: I experimented with smoking crack to increase finger efficiency. Since then I've quit, and I've been living in Miami trying to create a lofi industrial folk album using nothing but a TI-84, some wire, and an old fender amp.

Start with a TI Basic program on ti 84 plus in schhol. The program was written by my math teacher an calculate within 10 step the square root from an number.
Then i start code my on programs and play a costum os on my ti. Years later start with java in computer science at school. Coding in java editor.

Approaching the limit of what TI-BASIC can do without busting out the modern calcs. Doing a simple operation on the whole 95x63 1bpp graph mode screen, say, turning all pixels on or off, takes over a minute. Add any sort of calculation to that...
I'm already using BASIC-callable machine code snippets to scroll the screen one pixel (which are nigh instantly finished,) and i'm so fucking tired of scrolling effects...

God, adding sound is gonna be a nightmare...

EDIT: for reference, dev machine is a TI-84+ Silver Edition. Not one of the ones with the eZ80 and backlit color screens, the greenish Z80 1bpp screened one. The one that's an 8MHz Zilog that TI decided to make multitask. The one where oscillating the screen at an integer division of full framerate fries it in seconds?

Time for a 00:30 rant that has no structure!
(There is a theme tho)

TI-BASIC optimization (framecount is from TI-84 Silver, with the higher Z80 clock):

"0→S": 3 frames
"DelVar S": 2 frames
```
0
Ans →S
```
1 frame???
(Variable "Ans" holds the last answer given to the normal calc functions. This makes it blazing fast to use [for some reason])

also refreshing the real TI-8x line's LCD at its actual, normal rate is bad and *SOMEHOW* ends in LCD overvolting (makes parts of the LCD blue instead of dark gray) after ~15 frames. The TI-8x line's normal OS thing refreshes the LCD at 30-45FPS depending on their clock speed, the LCD is native 80FPS. Just figured i should point this out. (Yes, TI, you do make hardware, it's just that sometimes you should make it when SANE)

why the fuck did they make a multitasking machine that runs on a Z80 at, like, 7/8 the original Gameboy's speed (the B/W DMG, the original. The CGB had DoubleSpeed mode.)