<story><title>The Lost Ways of Programming: Commodore 64 Basic</title><url>http://tomasp.net/commodore64/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>gnat</author><text>We take it for granted now with the prevalence and acceptance of interpreted languages like Python and Perl, but the radical accessibility of BASIC can&amp;#x27;t be over-emphasized. C, Pascal, FORTRAN, and friends all had a compile step which meant that you had to operate a text editor and command-line... BASIC was so much more immediate and straightforward to learn on.&lt;p&gt;The other great reason so many of us 40-somethings got our start on the BASIC-wielding micros was that our universe was pretty small and the simple things we could make our machines do were still fancy. These days it seems that you won&amp;#x27;t interest kids with anything short of a 40fps multiplayer battle royale game with millions of polygons on screen. Random number guessing games are lame, Dad.&lt;p&gt;The early web was a lot like the early micros -- you had to make your own entertainment as you quickly ran out of things to do, and the things you were able to make were comparable to the things built by well-founded teams. The opportunity to add something new and useful to the web is largely past, and any window is even smaller if you&amp;#x27;re not a venture-backed team.&lt;p&gt;Old man out. &amp;lt;mic drop&amp;gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Lost Ways of Programming: Commodore 64 Basic</title><url>http://tomasp.net/commodore64/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>UI_at_80x24</author><text>I cut my teeth on C64 BASIC.  I got one (a C64) for christmas 1984, the manual had several pages of sample programs that you could program (one ever had a mistake in it).  By New Years day I had tried atleast 4 of them.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll be honest, I had more fun making making ASCII art that would endlessly scroll &amp;amp; loop thanks to a &amp;quot;GOTO 10&amp;quot; at the end of my creation.&lt;p&gt;If I&amp;#x27;m even more honest, I find myself wishing for a GOTO command I could use in my bash scripts once in a blue moon.  (I know they are a bad&amp;#x2F;horrible&amp;#x2F;lame crutch, but my brain seems to blank out any other options and just says to me:  a GOTO would work perfect here.)&lt;p&gt;If it wasn&amp;#x27;t for a C64 and BASIC, I wouldn&amp;#x27;t have the career and love of technology that I still do [Checks calendar, HOLY FUCK] 36 years later.</text></comment>