Blaming the processor doesn't make any sense. Early x86 / DOS machines were very accessible. They all shipped with BASIC.
I'd say blame Windows. If Windows had shipped with the equivalent of GW-BASIC + extensions, we'd have a different discussion...
I'd say blame Windows. If Windows had shipped with the equivalent of GW-BASIC + extensions, we'd have a different discussion...
Yep!
The original IBM PC/XT machines came with BASIC in ROM. If you turned it on without a DOS floppy disk in it, it booted into BASIC instead. On early IBM PC clones (that omitted BASIC to save cost), instead of saying "no boot disk found" they would error out with "No ROM BASIC"
The BIOS interrupt call 18h still exists to launch BASIC from ROM
Windows 98 shipped with Windows Scripting Host that could run .vbs scripts. I wrote a lengthy (10 page, IIRC) "introduction to programming" article for a gaming magazine years ago that only used VBScript since that was simple enough syntactically (no weird sigils) and available in every computer out of the box (i even got a couple of people thanking me for this :-P).
And of course Internet Explorer with JScript was in there since Win95 OSR.
True, it doesn't. I've expressed this opinion in my further reply in the thread, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19953066, and suggested the cultural shift due to desktop computing is a better angle to view this issue.
I said "you'd better to blame Intel 8086" rhetorically just to pointed out some historical background.