I kind of agree, it's an interesting observation that BASIC is actually pretty close to a simple machine if you think of the line numbers as addresses, goto as

I kind of agree, it's an interesting observation that BASIC is actually pretty close to a simple machine if you think of the line numbers as addresses, goto as jumps and the keywords as instructions. I dipped my toes in BASIC on the C64 when I was around 8 until I got my first PC at 10, and there I continued to play around with QBASIC (it was AWESOME for having the on-line help built into the IDE!!!), but my efforts never amounted to much, I never really got it and I never really made anything beyond tic-tac-toe and a few animations using the "screen 13" mode.. I only learned to program proper in PHP and later C, and JavaScript, then ASM, but to this day, I've never done anything substantial in BASIC, it's just too hard! But, as a language that introduces a few of the easier concepts, yeah, I kind of think it might be good.. I tried once to "bootstrap" on the C64, I wrote a text-editor, so that I could write the asm files.. That worked out okay. Then I started writing the assembler, in basic, and got it to spit out a few opcodes and it did generate executable images in the end, but it was so slow (something about how you load characters in from disk and concatenating strings made it run out of string memory right away and start spending all the time cleaning up instead). I'm wondering what language I should introduce to my kid if he shows the interest, it might be whatever is adjacent to the game he might want to mod..