Hacker News Reader

There is no new BASIC. BASIC was the de facto operating system for most personal computers. You would turn it on and you'd be presented with BASIC.

There's just nothing like that today. Computers today keep regular users as far away from programming as possible.

View on HN

The browser is the "de facto operating system" for the web and javascript is its programming language. Javascript really is the new BASIC...

And the average Chrome user is not likely to discover View->Developer->JavaScript Console, and enter console.log("Hello world!")

They aren't meant to.

That's a big stretch. Javascript is underneath everything in the web, but users aren't forced to interact with it every time they open their browser.

> BASIC was the de facto operating system for most personal computers.

The de facto OS shell for most personal computers before IBM compatibles and DOS took over (it still came with BASIC, but it was no longer in a shell-equivalent role.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com