I first learned to program playing with TI-BASIC on my TI-84 calculator in high school. I would never recommend it for a new, fully fledged software project th

I first learned to program playing with TI-BASIC on my TI-84 calculator in high school. I would never recommend it for a new, fully fledged software project these days. But I would consider it a great learning tool. Can't speak to other BASIC dialects, but TI-BASIC to me was perfect due to how limited the syntax was, and because of the TI-84 interface, to program directly on the calculator you had to select the keywords from a menu interface, which was great for feature discovery. Even if you weren't programming in a menu interface, you could probably have a single page keyword cheatsheet/language spec sitting alongside you to remind you of basically everything supported by the language. To this day, I suppose I wouldn't completely scoff at someone who was using BASIC for very basic scripting or doing a quick computation. It is still kind of enjoyable due to how simple it is, and I'm guessing non-professionals probably could figure out what it's doing as long as the program is short enough.