I disagree. I've lived through various levels of programming languages and it makes me appreciate features in languages that, these days, are just taken for gr

I disagree. I've lived through various levels of programming languages and it makes me appreciate features in languages that, these days, are just taken for granted. I've got a few vintage BASIC machines now and some of the code for those machines is almost unreadable. What struck me now that didn't when I was kid was kind of how much like assembly language BASIC can be in some of these computers. On machines with very limited RAM but plenty of ROM, BASIC acts like compression allowing you to write much more complex programs than you could actually fit in RAM if you did everything in machine code. And, like assembly, being terse and clever can result in better performance and smaller code. I'm considering writing a BASIC-to-BASIC compiler for these machines that works something like a JavaScript minifier.