AMPLELanguage
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Programming language based on ForthLanguage for programming music on the old Acorn 500 synth.
I did a lot of programming in it to make music in the 80s. It was pretty cool.
You can now try it on the web-based emulator. Very cool!!!
https://bbc.godbolt.org/?hasMusic5000=true&keyLayout=natural&disc1=5000mstr36008.ssd#&autoboot
Doh! I just realized that it's a pun on the name Ampleforth. Probably named after the school in England. (Though as I googled that, I noticed Ampleforth is now also a CryptoCurrency)
Work on emulating the Music 500/5000 : http://8bs.com/emum5000.htm Maybe I'll write AMPLE again someday.
Others investigating this :
Quora Answer : What programming language do you wish hadn't died out?
There are a tonne of languages which were really interesting and well done in the past, which are limping along in obscurity.
We talk all the time about how good Smalltalk was. And why it never made it big.
Lisp isn't as popular as it deserves to be. Prolog even more so.
But these are not languages that actually died out. You can use them today, and they have versions with reasonable libraries so you can do real work with them.
But in the 80s, I wrote music using the AMPLE programming language. A kind of Forth retrofitted with extra commands to control the Hybrid 5000 synthesizer and music system. It was actually an interesting and powerful way to program music.
And as far as I can tell, that is something you literally can't run anywhere (except maybe inside an emulator of a mid-80s BBC Micro which has managed to emulate the Music 5000 system. That's about as near to "died out" as you get these days.)
It was fun and I wish I could play with it again.
Backlinks (2 items)