I always had contempt for BASIC languages in the 80th. Being a tough demo coder in assembler, I thought that this isn't the real stuff.
Today I agree with you.
After re-entering the world of 8bit and 16bit Commodores again, I finally utilized these. Indeed you could do quite a few tricks with them, and they are quite powerful.
There is beauty in the ease of use of these languages. And to be honest, there is a lot of hardship in languages like assembler.
The whole IDE idea for Java, Kotlin, etc. reminds me more of BASIC than C. Especially that BASIC is somewhat forgiving if you make mistakes, aka bugs, I appreciate. If you make mistakes in assembler on Amiga 500/1200, for example, you most often have to reset the machine. If you forgot to save your work before testing, you would suffer even more. And this is not the coolest of all workflows. Even on emulators like WinUAE, where you need timing to hit the debug key.
Assembler is complicated (word operations accessing an odd memory address is hard to find) and only useful in very constraint areas like elder computers.
BASIC is simple, and therefore fast.
With computers doing the heavy lifting nowadays, I keep the speed part to the computers while focusing on fast iterations. Except for the Amiga, where I think that BASIC and assembler can coexist nowadays for me. Should have utilized BASIC back then for simple things.
80’s Basic “REPL” and lack of local context (except for BBC Basic) made observing and debugging programs much easier than any modern system, despite the amazing debuggers we now have.
Break/modify/continue was the norm. It somehow worked much better than e.g. the JavaScript console on a modern browser even though reading a description of it wouldn’t give any indication of that.
Today I agree with you.
After re-entering the world of 8bit and 16bit Commodores again, I finally utilized these. Indeed you could do quite a few tricks with them, and they are quite powerful.
There is beauty in the ease of use of these languages. And to be honest, there is a lot of hardship in languages like assembler.
The whole IDE idea for Java, Kotlin, etc. reminds me more of BASIC than C. Especially that BASIC is somewhat forgiving if you make mistakes, aka bugs, I appreciate. If you make mistakes in assembler on Amiga 500/1200, for example, you most often have to reset the machine. If you forgot to save your work before testing, you would suffer even more. And this is not the coolest of all workflows. Even on emulators like WinUAE, where you need timing to hit the debug key.
Assembler is complicated (word operations accessing an odd memory address is hard to find) and only useful in very constraint areas like elder computers.
BASIC is simple, and therefore fast.
With computers doing the heavy lifting nowadays, I keep the speed part to the computers while focusing on fast iterations. Except for the Amiga, where I think that BASIC and assembler can coexist nowadays for me. Should have utilized BASIC back then for simple things.