80’s Basic “REPL” and lack of local context (except for BBC Basic) made observing and debugging programs much easier than any modern system, despite the amazing

80’s Basic “REPL” and lack of local context (except for BBC Basic) made observing and debugging programs much easier than any modern system, despite the amazing debuggers we now have. Break/modify/continue was the norm. It somehow worked much better than e.g. the JavaScript console on a modern browser even though reading a description of it wouldn’t give any indication of that.