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Comment by Jare | Hacker News Reader

Hehe the guessing game was my fist too, way before I even had a computer.

I think what we have lost from the old 8-bit computers and their BASIC, was the ability to instantly have something show on the screen, like the classic Sinclair Spectrum spider web:

    10 FOR n=0 TO 31
    20 PLOT n*11,0
    30 DRAW -n*11, 175-n*8
    40 NEXT n

(or something like that) That stuff got me hooked.

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You can get pretty close to that with JavaScript, especially with all the CodePen-like sites out there -- but even without those, the JavaScript console is pretty similar to the old BASIC prompt in terms of immediacy and ubiquity.

JavaScript also has this in common with BASIC: the language bigots hate it. :-)

I like BASIC, C, D, Objective C, Perl, Lua, 8080 and x86 Assembly (no code for around 15 years, but still) and probably few others catched my eye, like Io, LISP, Haskell, but I had no time to master these, only done a bunch of snippets discovering their power. But I hate js (and php) with all of my soul’s strings, no matter how much time I spent learning or fixing it. How about that single data point.

Otoh, I bet most js bigots only know one language very good, guess what it’s name is.

Indeed! I defended JS for this exact purpose after the 2D canvas became truly ubiquitous. Still a minor amount of boilerplate but you can be drawing stuff in no time. With an integrated editor it would be perfect!

Python still has Turtle in its standard library, with which you can create direct and simple graphics like you describe.

https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html

There is also a thing called Logo (http://www.softronix.com/logo.html); that implementation is windows-only and old, but it was a glorious first programming language for me. There is also a unix version called ucblogo, but when I tried that a while ago on mac, it was terribly slow and didn't have a number of the nice additions that mswlogo had.

Fun fact: LOGO is a LISP.

For people looking through the archives: FMSLogo is an updated version of MSWLogo, and is linked to from the same page. It runs beautifully under Wine, too, so not being on Windows is no excuse for not trying it out. ;)

This is a niche I think Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) does a pretty good job of filling

And if I remember right, on some Spectrum model you even had all the basic commands written on keys (I was once hunting with a friend for the famous "any" key which we had determined had to be pressed in order to get to play Pyjamarama)

Your code does not work for me. I get syntax error in line 20: https://imgur.com/a/mqI29. What did I do wrong and how can I get it to work?

It's for the ZX Spectrum: https://imgur.com/a/Yb757

There's a Javascript emulator here: http://jsspeccy.zxdemo.org/

128K mode is easier because it lets you type the keywords instead of pressing single key shortcuts. For the punctuation, type:

ctrl-l for =

ctrl-b for *

ctrl-alt-n for ,

ctrl-j for -

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