Hi, author of the original post here. I think I mostly agree with this. My frame of mind when writing this was about starting from scratch, without an existing

Hi, author of the original post here. I think I mostly agree with this. My frame of mind when writing this was about starting from scratch, without an existing mental model of computers, or much outside help. Despite the odd syntax (by modern standards,) I just think there was less cognitive load to get started with the old 8 bit BASICs, and they all had the sorts of things kids like to experiment with (sound, graphics) built in. I also wasn’t thinking about this from the perspective of the tooling discouraging someone from wanting to learn - that just wasn’t a problem my friends and I had, but I can see how the modern tools could be more likely to inspire someone on the fence to continue. Anyway, thanks for the comment.