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Comment by dingosity | Hacker News Reader

I just looked at https://www.parallax.com/ and it seems the BASIC Stamps are being EoL'd, but their remaining stock is on sale. The Propeller (the follow-on to the BASIC Stamp) is kind of interesting and the site implies you can run PBASIC code on the Propeller 2 ( you learn something new every day. ) I used a BASIC Stamp way back when and it wasn't a horrible experience. People dis on BASIC, but if you have a simple app, it's not that bad.

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If you want a scripting language appropriate for that environment I think it's OK. You gotta remember that Microsoft BASIC fit comfortably in real small machines back in the day, like my TRS-80 Color Computer that started out with 4K of RAM including video RAM!

Personally though I think even C is too high level for the AVR-8 and like coding assembly with the caveat that there are two ways "up" if you outgrow AVR-8, one route is to go to ARM or ESP32 in which case your C is portable, the other is to go to an FPGA with a soft AVR-8 and talk about playing on hard mode.

Yup. Chuck Peddle (one of the guys largely responsible for the design of the 6502) did an oral history interview with the CHM (Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.) In it he discussed their design process. They thought the market for the 6502 was as a controller (cars, HVAC, instrumentation, etc.), not the CPU of a microcomputer. But then Tiny BASIC came along at exactly the right time and hid the messier 6502 design decisions (zero page, weird addressing modes, 256 byte stack, etc.) from a whole bunch of users.

So yes... BASIC is absolutely a contender for small systems. But so are MicroLisp and FORTH. Personally, I prefer Lisp, but completely agree Lisp's learning curve is waaay steeper than BASIC's. Same for FORTH.

Here's the video, btw: https://youtu.be/enHF9lMseP8?si=atmDesKCxN9eH_6R

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