I love this essay, but at the same time understand why it would be very, very difficult to recapture the days of my youth. BASIC was, absolutely, a carrier of

I love this essay, but at the same time understand why it would be very, very difficult to recapture the days of my youth. BASIC was, absolutely, a carrier of culture in a way that no programming language is today. There were armies of geeky young kids in the suburbs who got Commodore 64s or TI 99/4s for x-mas. Maybe one in ten kept with it to the point they wrote a halfway complex program. But that's still tens or hundreds of thousands of kids all experiencing the same joy of debugging programs you typed in from a print magazine. BASIC defined what we knew about computing and to paraphrase McLuhan... "The programming language is the program." And BASIC itself got stuffed into early micros 'cause 6502 or 8080 assembly is irritating, if not hard. Chuck Peddle commented on a Computer History Museum Oral History that they originally thought of the 6502 as an industrial or automotive controller, and it wasn't until people like Woz and Bill Gates were stuffing BASIC into Apple ]['s and Commodore PETS (I think the TRS-80 originally had Tiny BASIC)... but it wasn't until BASIC appeared built into the system that the "rough patches" were worn down. Sure, BASIC is a crap language compared to <whatever your current favourite language is>, but it ran in 4-8K of 8080 or 6502 opcodes. Try and stuff Python in to 8k. BASIC was "good enough" to write simple programs on primitive microcomputers. And the experience of just turning something on and typing at a BASIC program 6 seconds later is sort of lost. And while I love my leenucks bocks, I do sort of miss my 99/4.