BASIC was ideal for introducing a generation of school kids to programming. Back in the 80’s you fired up your computer and you had a readily-available interpr

BASIC was ideal for introducing a generation of school kids to programming. Back in the 80’s you fired up your computer and you had a readily-available interpreter for which you could immediately do ‘real’ stuff like printing characters anywhere on the screen and turning on and off pixels (even in colour on some platforms). There was no need to compile or build a project or start with a lot of boilerplate. You just did stuff right away from a REPL or could make programs from line numbers and save them. I learned a ton from it. Eg how to think algorithmically and break up something complicated into small parts. A key milestone was grokking the difference between GOTO and GOSUB. I also understood much about its limitations once I started learning Turbo Pascal in high school. If you’re judging BASIC compared to a modern IDE with a modern structured language of course it falls short, but for what it was at the time it was nearly perfect.