Can we all just have a moment of silence for BASIC...

Got caught in a YouTube spiral watching nostalgia need and never realised how big and important BASIC was when it came to home PC's (I'm 21 so have no actual experience with said PC's)...

Also that leads me to the question as to why BASIC isn't still used?

It's actually a really legible language ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

When I was a kid, I remember getting a book at a radio shack that had listings in BASIC for about 50 games. The really long ones ran a couple of pages. My siblings and I would turn on my Mom's TRS-80 (The only one I was aware of that anybody I knew had access to), and take turns typing in the code. After an hour or so, we could run the game. We'd run something like a randomized horse race over and over. The drama of seeing "horse 6 wins!" appear after 30 seconds was awesome. Yeah, it sounds barbaric, but it was like magic back then.

@FrodoSwaggins the fragmentation is almost where is see it as a benifit, it's a very utilitarian language that can be easily modified to include required functions and the like (similar to how people us JavaScript) but can see what you mean by it, and 100% agree that VB.NET is sort of a 'useless' language as it is just a middle between BASIC and C# that just isn't as good as C#

@monkeyboy this makes me feel nostalgic and I wasn't even around for it all *cries tears*

I'm 22 and I learned programming with TIBasic. But, admittedly, the TI-84+ hardware that we had at school was ancient, so I'm not sure if that counts as "still used today".

I wrote a lot of C64 Basic when I was young. The issue is that to do anything interesting (sounds, sprites), you have to poke and peek a lot of raw binary stuff into registers, you're always bound quite tightly to line numbers because of goto statements, and you can't easily build libraries/modules either.

It was such a pain that more and more functionality started to appear in the form of hardware cartridges to extend the language and provide tools for assembling stuff — but this fragmented the system more, because there were multiple cartridges and if the dev used an FC3 an end user would also need a FC3 module, or you needed to distribute your own programs on eeprom cartridges as well.

And even back then, I knew I was not a console pleb.

@bittersweet i was able to play with c64 BASIC as well.

I had no clue what i was doing and probably thought i hated programming at the time.

And the last part of your post got me.