I think TI-BASIC is a strong competitor. A free-form keyboard can be overwhelming and the different things you can do aren't very discoverable. In the TI-BASIC

I think TI-BASIC is a strong competitor. A free-form keyboard can be overwhelming and the different things you can do aren't very discoverable. In the TI-BASIC environment on the TI-82/83/83+/84+, the keywords (Goto, While, Disp, ClrHome, etc) are tokens which must be inserted into the program by selecting them from menus. So you get a rich set of powerful commands (easily in the hundreds, even for the simple TI-84, and many more for the TI-89) but they're all discoverable through the normal menus and through the catalog menu. You start out knowing a few commands like Lbl and Goto, but through the process of scrolling over unknown commands (like maybe For or While in the control flow menu) repeatedly you start to wonder what they do, and then try them out, until you know what everything does and you can write the cleanest possible code. It's a wonderful way to learn. And it supports both a text mode (with a "write string at grid position" operation for easy game making - text mode is a must on the CPU-starved TI-84+) and a graphical mode, with tons of stuff to do in both. For example, in high school I had a program that accepted a string of "DNA" and used it to repeatedly call the built-in pattern-drawing command with different arguments, producing a mosaic of overlapping patterns, so that each different input string produced a different final pattern. It's like 4 lines of code and kept me endlessly entertained in class. And that brings me to its greatest advantage- its presence in the math classroom. In middle school and high school, math for a gifted student is boring as death, and you've got a little BASIC interpreter sitting right there on your desk. You can transform hundreds of wasted hours a year into productive learning time.