Hello there! Name's Lucas, and I'm an old amigan(but actually quite young if we talk classic amigans - 22) who has finally parted with his A500 nearly 10 years ago (yup, I was a kid, but a true amigan at heart writing simple games in AMOS for myself etc. =) ) and has been in "away" state in the world of Amiga since then.
Recently I've started popping in on various Amiga sites(earlier I did once a year or so...?) and I've seen both bad and good thing.. bad? Amiga community divided like Korea, good? The fact the 'show must go on' of course. And recently the news about AmigaOS 4 netbook which might, just might draw old amigans like myself to see how's it rollin today - depending on how useful it turns out to be.
I know C/C++ a bit (been interested in so-called "Elfpack" for non-smart Sony Ericsson phones for a while) so I hope to be able to contribute somehow, probably in more distant future though by the reasons mentioned below.
That's all for introduction, I've got completely no Amiga (MOS/AOS) hardware for now so I'll rather stay a 'just a reader' for a while =). See you on forums!
I'm not interested in coding for classic Amigas. Past is past, 68k is buried deep beneath the ground for me.
I thought of rather using AROS for now to get on to AOS libraries and system-specific stuff (they're all derived from AOS 3.x, after all) but I've been told that AROS/AOS4/MOS have diverged too much from each other for one to be a good reference for programming on the other... (so yeah here I must note that I get your point - but it's still not for me to do something under emulation.. =)). Well I'm not in hurry, I'll take my time to do theoretical research first
Welcome aboard, and hope to see you among "real" AmigaOS 4 owners in a not too distant future!
EDIT: BTW if you liked Amos, you should try and get your hands on Hollywood for your Win-box. It's not all the same, but it is great doing little graphics presentation and small games and all. And it is in the true Amiga spirit!
Welcome friend, there is a good option in your case, buy Hollywood, the Windos version if you don't want/might to buy the new Amiga hardware, with this good programming language, you can make programs for all Amiga systems besides of Windos, MAC OS(PPC/x86) and Linux.
Welcome to the fold! The Amiga community isn't actually as divided as it seems - most of us only wish well to the other flavours. The problem is that the black sheep are the most vocal, so it seems a lot worse than it is.
Sure you'll enjoy your Amiga when you get one; you'll find a lot of helpful and knowledgable people on this site particularly!
I thought of rather using AROS for now to get on to AOS libraries and system-specific stuff (they're all derived from AOS 3.x, after all) but I've been told that AROS/AOS4/MOS have diverged too much from each other for one to be a good reference for programming on the other...
Have a look at PortablE, which now makes it easy to write programs that work the same on AmigaOS4, AROS & MOS (plus AmigaOS3 & Windows to a lesser extent).
It comes with standard modules that hide the differences of the different OSes, but even if you want to directly access the OSes then you will find that the differences are very small (or even non-existant) for the shared AmigaOS3 heritage.
@MaW The E language works a lot like C underneath the skin (e.g. you have pointers), but it is (IMHO) much nicer to read & use due to a friendly/readable syntax, safer & more sensible defaults, a better & more modern design (from the 1990s not 1960s!), and so on.
PortablE (a modern variant of E) compiles down to plain C code (it does use C++ for a few features, but eventually I want to do them with plain C instead).
Also, E was also originally designed for AmigaOS, which C was not, and therefore I'd claim it is sometimes more suited to writing AmigaOS programs than C. e.g. Tag lists are really easy.