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Except it's way less discoverable. The BASIC prompt was all you got on some 8 bits computers, so it made playing with it almost mandatory. Also everything was way simpler (less abstractions layers, no network) to grok for a young kid.

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And all of your BASIC was in the manual, taught to you as soon as you bought the computer.

I picked BASIC in 3rd grade reading a "stolen" math book. I saw a bunch of 10 line examples in its pages and remembered that weird pc jr. cartridge that said basic. The cartridge seemed useless until that day....

my experience was I would not have learned anything without a manual and examples. There was no autocomplete so there was no discoverabliy and there was no internet so unless you bought a book or happened to have access to a library that had modern basic books you were out of luck.

VS Today wheer there are 1000s of websites that will teach you JavaScript and 1000s of free video classes and hundreds of thousands of free examples. JavaScript is several orders of magnitude more discovable than basic ever was

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