@veer66 @emacsen Atari LOGO was the first programming language to really truly blow my mind. Still amazed at the fact that I never ever saw anything like Dynaturtles in any other language and most don't know what I'm talking about when I mention them :)

(You could change the turtle's shape and color and give them velocity & direction, as well as do collision detection between them and other turtles, pixels etc. It was awesome :)

@emacsen Wow that is rather impressive! Back in the days when software and hardware actually came with meaningful documentation and not just a tiny slip of paper with a URL in utterly unreadable tiny text :)

@emacsen Actually thinking about it your choice of comparison to Lua is VERY apt and rather interesting. Lua is a simple language but one that can be incredibly expressive and powerful. So is BASIC, but we can't ignore the fact that Lua's designers had another 30 years of prior art to work from that BASIC's original creators did not :)

In a sense, platforms like PICO-8 and TIC-80 are kind of what we're talking about here, even though they don't strictly speaking exist as hardware.

@emacsen No I get that, and I don't want to come off as glorifying BASIC as somehow being the perfect programming language. ZOMG it isn't.

However over the last year or so I've been really getting back into Atari 8 bit hacking, and I just found myself sitting there at an ATARI BASIC prompt, typing in expressions, making pretty graphics on the screen, and remembering how EASY & welcoming it felt all those years ago to turn on a machine, get a READY prompt, and start exploring.

@emacsen It's a valid question. I think the answer is: maybe? Like I said in a previous reply to someone else, part of BASIC's charm is its REPL. I guess you could easily create a REPL in Lua as well.

So yeah, if you gave me a Lua REPL with direct hardware access to an architecture simple enough to fit in my brain, then I'd probably love it just as much if not more.

Got such a thing lying around? :)

@scruss Also I for one would love to see your overly large list of BASIC things :)

@scruss Awesome! So great to see so many people dipping into the retro well. There really is a LOT of great tech there just lying around waiting to be appreciated and to teach younger folks important things about computing that are even more valuable today in some ways :)

@scruss I will say, to your point, that one of the things BASIC and Python/CircuitPython have in common is extreme interactivity and real time feedback loops via a REPL.

I know 1980s BASIC READY prompt doesn't seem like a REPL but it most assuredly is one :)

@Azure I love this kind of thought experiment!

You have me thinking about those rigs for when people want to dive REALLY deep where they actually ARE breathing gas infused liquid...

@lopta @vfrmedia @hairylarry For what it’s worth I have never personally laid hands on a CP/M machine myself. I’ve just been reading about them for years and I find them kind of fascinating :-)

@Wintermute_BBS Microsoft BASIC I'd guess given your pinned tweet. I'd never heard of the RC2014 before. That little board looks VERY neat!

@Wintermute_BBS Yeah I also don't know that a lot of people know just how deep the CP/M ecosystem was back in the day. I never had a CP/M machine, but I read a *LOT* about them, including Jerry Pournelle's CP/M boxes - named Zeke and I can't rremember what the other was :) in I think Byte or Doctor Dobbs Journal :)

@hairylarry Being angry at MSFT in 2022 for decisions they made in 1980 just makes me chortle :)

Sure, I'd have liked it if everyone embraced The One True filesystem / directory structure and The One True POSIX API but, you know, like, life happens and I can't personally be bothered to sweat that level of detail *40 years later* :)

@lopta Yeah dealing with the line editor and line numbers is definitely a throwback :) And there's no easy way to renumber either!

@lopta Kind of interesting IMO when you look at what modern BASIC versions are floating around these days:

A) There are a TON of them
B) There are a TON of them that are either 100% commercial or have some free and some commercial bits

BASIC may be the 'cold dark matter' programmer's language of choice :)

@lopta @comchia Nice! Which variant is your favorite?

@lopta @comchia You don't need to grasp for an 8 bit version just because that's what we've been chatting about! Modern variants are cool too :) Bywater looks pretty neat actually.

Just a tiny teaser example. I wrote this ugly bugger simple drawing program in < 10m:
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@living8bit

Atari 8 bit BASIC. The original version, not any of the nicer XL, XE, or Turbo varieties :)

Picking up #basic again really is like riding a bike.

It's not the prettiest #programming language, or the most elegant - not by a long shot, but working in it again I'm reminded of what an incredible gateway drug it was for so many of us to a life long love of computing.

There's something super powerful at play here beyond #retro. I do think there are things we could learn from it in modern designs.