Context: I grew up with a Commodore 64. So I wasn't around "since the beginning" of BASIC but I've clocked some real time with it. Looking back on it, I don't

Context: I grew up with a Commodore 64. So I wasn't around "since the beginning" of BASIC but I've clocked some real time with it. Looking back on it, I don't think there was anything special about BASIC, from a modern point of view. Historically, yes, very significant language; that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that BASIC's justified reputation for being an "easy" language is very much the product of what the competition was. On the small side of the computer space, the competition was assembly. Yeah, BASIC is easier than assembly. But that's not really saying much. On the large computer side you have some more competition with C and a handful of other viable languages, but they're all just terrible. You can't get a sense of what 1970s or 1980s C looked like by looking at a modern code base. C style has come a long way. The competition was even worse than it is today. (I'm also talking the "average" code base, not things like the annotated UNIX that does look pretty nice, but is also among the best of the best of the era.) Yeah, BASIC was easier than that, and again, that's not saying much. It also sacrificed a looooot of capability for that easiness. We've built many languages since then that are easier than C without the massive sacrifice of capability. Some sacrifice, yes, but nowhere near as much. Having more computing resources available has not hurt, that's for sure. By modern standards it makes a wide variety of terrible and/or baffling decisions. Even in its final form of Visual Basic .Net it was not a great language; if you target the earlier iterations which is where it earned its reputation it has even more baffling decisions. For instance, the memory model the language was built around was basically completely static allocation of everything. It's better to start with a good design then to start with a language that was built around that, then fixed up later. Based on the author's description of the situation, the easiest and most natural choice is to stick Lua on it. It's a modern language, the AIs know it, there's abundant documentation for it every which way, it's already a de facto standard in the gaming space so the users can be learning skills they can take elsewhere in the space later. If anything the biggest disadvantage is the amount of documentation a user can find that is Lua, but bound to some completely different environment that might confuse the newbie, or written by some other novice giving terrible advice. But my real point here is that I would tend to discourage starting with BASIC, and having kind of already started, I'd advise dropping it ASAP. It's not a very good building point in 2026 and there are a lot of good ones to choose from.