Am I missing something, how is: #include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); } just as easy as: 10 PRINT "Hello World!" Later versions of B

Am I missing something, how is: #include <stdio.h> int main() { printf("Hello World!\n"); } just as easy as: 10 PRINT "Hello World!" Later versions of BASIC like QBasic dropped the line numbers even. BASIC won because there was no friction and no ceremony involved with writing simple programs. Displaying text, getting input from the user, and doing simple mathematical calculations were relatively intuitive. Control flow was easy with GOTO. You could learn how to do all these things in an afternoon. Most microcomputer bundled BASICS even had primitive facilities for handling graphics, sound, and joysticks, so you had all you needed to make simple games. You could even PEEK and POKE at the memory, meaning you could even do some pretty advanced programming without reaching for C, Pascal, or Assembler. Incidentally, I believe this is why Python is so popular today. It's just a saner iteration on BASIC in many aspects.