Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
As someone who spent a decent chunk of his youth typing BASIC commands from Books like these into a Mattel Aquarius, I’m pretty disenchanted by the choice of languages.<p>None of them embody the human-first optimism of early BASICs. BASIC was designed for <i>normal humans</i> to actually get work done, the same vision HyperCard would bring later. It’s reflected and it’s very English syntax. It was, in no uncertain terms, the actual User Interface to many if not most consumer level machines of the age.<p>I don’t have a strong proposition for a specific language. QB64 is maybe the closest syntactically, but nothing lives up to the <i>spirit</i> of the originals that I am aware of. I was kind of hopeful I was going to get to the end of this and it was going to be a call for developers to work on a new, modern, humane programming language.<p>People try to tell me that dream is dead. God I hope not, computers in the hands of most users are 99% untapped potential. It’s as if Prometheus give us fire, and we only ever used it to light cigarettes. Every time a user does a repetitive task that should have been a loop they created themself, that waste of life is a small death, and the blood is on our industry.