[analog31]

When I learned BASIC in ca. 1981, my high school had these machines that looked like a keypunch but recorded your "cards" on a floppy disk. You handed the disk to the computer operator and got your printout back later. Terminals were installed a year later.

It meant that you got maybe a couple debug cycles per class hour at most. The lectures, and most programming and debugging, were conducted by tracing through programs on paper or the chalkboard. The simplicity of "thinking like the machine" in BASIC was valuable for this process.

Maybe not any more, now that computers are widely accessible. But I have a hunch that thinking through algorithms is still an important stepping stone towards becoming a programmer.