Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC

Plus a lot of his complaints seem to be about the modularisation of modern languages - which seem an odd complaint to make in my opinion. If anything, I'd personally argue that things like importable, self-contained, chunks of code is one of the single greatest advances.

He definitely has a point that the barrier for entry these days is much higher (and this is probably why so many kids these days fall into web development over native applications) but I think the examples he's used don't justify the conclusion he's trying to draw. And neither do I agree that regressing to a BASIC-like environment would fix the problem. I think the problem is simply expectation - people expect so much more that there often isn't the patience to start with the basics. Plus the "code me!" vs the "consume me!" mindset raised by chx[1] erodes what little patience some might have.

That's my 2c worth anyway

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8256211

Except what you've described is exactly what I described with Bash ;)

> What BASIC was, was an extremely accessible try-it-now environment that needed no installation, no setup, no environment variables, no directory structure. It was what we thought of when we thought of interpreters, as opposed to compilers. But then interpreters got all file-oriented and broken too.

Again, all that is comparable with Bash:

1. Bash doesn't need any installation with most UNIX-like systems. But even in the rare example that Bash isn't bundled with your OS, there's the Bourne Shell (sh) or even Windows cmd.exe (for all it's faults).

2. Bash et al doesn't require any set up.

3. Environmental variables are just global OS variables and since BASIC wasn't namespaced, all variables were effectively environmental variables.

4. Directories are a file system thing, not a language thing. However it's worth noting that many BASIC systems did have a directory structure even if though (at that point) nested subdirectories didn't really exist. You could have different storage devices that were switchable (akin to changing drive letter in DOS) and you could store multiple files on an particular medium. In fact I still have a stack of floppy disks for an Amstrad CPC 464 (which ran Locamotic BASIC) in my attic that would testify to this.

5. Bash et al are interpreters.

Don't get me wrong, I romanises about the old days too. They were fun. But I don't think you can blanket say "[it's a] 20-year-old environment. Its not 'like' a lot of things" just to dismiss any arguments you dislike.

"The IDE facets that the author fondly remembers isn't part of the BASIC programming language, it's part of the command shell"

There was no such distinction. That's recasting of the facts into something understandandable today.

Know why the language keywords were so short? Because in an 8K ROM the symbol table was a significant hit on resources. Add a keyword? Means remove some other feature. It was a whole different world, with different constraints. And still it was usable, accessible, friendly even. At least when coming from nothing to a computer (instead of coming from 20 years of growth and confusing hindsight with foresight).