I still remember the appeal of BASIC to me as a kid. A simple GOTO loop over INKEY, in which you can test which key is pressed and erase+redraw a CIRCLE accordingly. A trivial thing, but the feel it created was unforgettable.

Idk what Dijkstra means. My whole generation started with BASIC and learned languages as they’ve become useful enough for every new wave of accessible hardware, which wasn’t cheap for a hobby. There was no like “oh, now you’re lost”. My next language was 8080 assembly then Pascal then 8086 then C. You just can’t learn Pascal and C on a Sinclair clone when loading a compiler from a tape recorder takes half an hour and most of the available memory. And you can’t learn Python either, because it doesn’t really exist yet. I know it’s from 1991, but never heard of it until ten+ years later.

I also know that some ROMs had FORTRAN instead. Maybe Dijkstra would like to re-teach FORTRAN programmers more.