[astrodust]

BASIC did enough damage to programmers. It's good that it's dead. Don't bring it back.

People mistake BASIC's simplicity with a feature. It's an atrocious language, it encourages the worst sorts of programming, and it's so feeble that doing anything useful in it is painful at best and discouraging at worst.

On the C64 with limited memory BASIC was a lot better than nothing, but today, given the vast wealth of documentation, of videos that explain fundamental concepts, there's no need for something as dumbed down and useless as BASIC.

Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby, anything modern on the Pi is a vastly better learning experience because not only can you pick up the basics, but you can apply that to real-world problems, possibly even get a job, and carry on learning.

With BASIC and hacking around in ignorance you're going to do everything wrong, and reversing all those bad habits is really tough to do. It takes years.

If you want to learn how to program the C64, stick to assembly. This used to be a dark art back in the 1980s, reference material was thin, examples scarce, but now there's an enormous wealth of that you can pick apart and learn from.

[rbanffy]

BASIC on an 8-bit computer is a bit closer to the underlying hardware than C and it's a worthy educational experience. You have to be clever to work with all global variables and subroutines instead of functions and you'll have to invent your own stack to express recursion.

[tluyben2]

In old 8-bit Basic it was, many times, a kind of battle between interpreter and assembly. I would write things in Basic, then see if it was fast enough. If it was not it usually was pretty obvious where the issue was; if the code was complex I would rewrite it to a version that more or less would convert to assembly naturally and then test again. You would have to lose basic pretty quickly especially for games, so in the end (of the 80s basically) I started straight in assembly. And that is what I missed and found again now in limited resource embedded chip programming; doing almost all the actual work in your head and on paper instead of trial and error everything.

[astrodust]

> BASIC on an 8-bit computer is a bit closer to the underlying hardware than C ...

Well, that's wrong. There's nothing about BASIC that has anything to do with hardware. If anything it made the computer feel like a rubber mallet when inside that hardware was some real power, if only you had the knowledge to unlock it. I always felt cheated, that no matter how well I knew BASIC my programs would be stupidly slow compared to someone who knew assembly.

C wasn't an option on something like the C64 since there was no C compiler. It was BASIC or, if you were bold, hand-written machine code. The tools were very primitive, very expensive, or both.

BASIC is junk. Get rid of it. Teach proper programming. If you really need to squeeze a lot out of your hardware, and on the C64 you absolutely need to, then it's assembly or machine language.

[rbanffy]

The point is not being fast, but easy. BASIC has GOTO and GOSUB, IFs (which take the place of conditional jumps), no stack (that you can use yourself), no named functions (except branchless one liners) and a meager set of primitive types which are handier than the 6502 registers. Ever tried floating point on a 6502? Even with the routines in ROM, it was all pain and suffering.

I am sorry you had such a bad experience with BASIC, but, for teaching the very basics of programming, it was a useful tool. In order to teach assembly you'd need a text editor, an assembler and a floppy disk. BASIC came up when you powered your machine on.

I used Aztec C on the Apple II and, while it was painfully slow, it was a reasonable C for the time and, IIRC, it had a C64 version.

[astrodust]

To be specific, I'm talking about today and how BASIC is an anachronism, not unlike making your own natural pigments just to learn how to paint.

BASIC was nothing but bullshit, it taught me nothing other than computers are obnoxious and difficult to use. I spent several years "learning" how to program in BASIC, later QuickBASIC, and the stuff I cranked out was atrociously bad. The only excuse I have is that I was coding like they did in the magazines I bought, their code was a disaster as well, and I had no way of knowing there was a better way.

It was only when I switched to Pascal (via TurboPascal) that I realized how to program. At that point things started to make sense, and no longer was I feeling like a third class citizen: Programs in TurboPascal would run very quickly compared to BASIC. They were compiled. While the performance wasn't on par with C, it wasn't nearly as hard to get right as C was.

I wouldn't recommend Pascal today, but there's other languages that are as good or better.

Today there's absolutely no reason to teach BASIC as an introduction to programming. You're only going to hurt people.

[rbanffy]

Would you have realized how Pascal is better without struggling with BASIC first?

[astrodust]

Would you have realized how C is better without struggling with machine opcodes first? Would you have realized how x86 is better without struggling with a 6502 first? Would you have realized how DRAM is better than struggling with drum memory first?

You can start anywhere if you like what you see and feel motivated to learn more.

[nom]

No, BASIC didn't do any damage to anyone, ever. You are so wrong here that I can't even express it. Your suggestions on the other hand are way off and may do even more damage than any BASIC dialect could.

Lua, Python, Node.js, Ruby and Assembly are the _worst_ languages you can teach a beginner. They are too complex, they behave weird and there are not enough constraints.

Even Processing/Arduino is better. It has to be as simple as possible.

I still suggest a BASIC dialect for beginners. People should really give Blitz BASIC a try, it's like BASIC on crack. It's super easy to render 2D and even 3D graphics and it has classes too (yes you read that right). I used it once, well over 10 years ago and it was unbelievably easy to handle, you can learn it on the fly. I think I was 15 years old at that time and I've never implemented a game more quickly.

[astrodust]

I can teach beginners any language and present it in terms they can absorb, even C, even assembly, even C++. With those it's a longer road to walk before the student can be productive, but it's possible if they're patient and willing to follow.

Ruby is one of the easiest languages to teach because it's very forgiving and it's really easy to navigate the documentation. In a single day people with no programming background can go from not being sure how to start to reading in things from a text file and producing useful output. Given a few weeks they can be interfacing with a database and making web pages.

You cannot do that with the sort of BASIC you got on the C64. Someone with enough patience and audacity could surely make a web server in BASIC for the C64, but it's such a ludicrous project that it would only serve as a proof of concept, not a useful tool.

Nothing you learn BASIC will ever help you. It's all garbage. You're viewing this through the rosy lens of history. At the time it was the best we had, we made do, we did great things with it, but now there's far better tools.

People can and do make furniture with hand-powered tools, but let's be honest. As much as power tools are more complicated and more dangerous, it's not hard for people to learn how to use them, and if they do they'll be far more productive.