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Comment by itomato | Hacker News Reader

Going back to a world where free and open software was the norm would be a mistake?

Being able to buy one of a half-dozen or more periodicals with informative commentary on an accessible programming language would be a mistake?

Empowering a generation of STEM learners with a basic programming language centered around the bedrock of computer science would be a mistake?

Safely and easily gaining first-hand experience with low-level hardware engineering principles would be a mistake?

Not PEEKing and POKEing in Primary school is a mistake.

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If you think BASIC was free and open have I got a letter from Bill Gates to show you.

GCC is free and open. Clang is free and open. BASIC is commercial, proprietary, closed-source software.

The "bedrock of computer science" is machine code, or if you're not a fan of reading and writing hex values or flipping physical switches on your Altair, then assembly. Everything after that is an abstraction.

Gates' copyrights on implementations of BASIC don't interest me. Blackjack, bubble sort and tower of hanoi in human-readable BASIC do.

C isn't suitable for most K-8 students. Explain malloc while I handle PRINT, INPUT, PEEK and POKE. We'll meet at memory registers and see whose student feels more confident.

You've created a layer cake of abstractions with your OS, advanced filesystem and C compiler (plus libraries). I presume a mouse and metaphorical desktop "icing" are included.

Your definition of "readable" is obviously a lot different than mine.

Consider DONKEY.BAS: https://github.com/coding-horror/donkey.bas/blob/master/donk...

Perl is more friendly and forgiving than that.

There are free and open BASIC interpreters and even compilers.

There are now, but this was not the case until relatively recently.

LOL what? BASIC has been around since before Microsoft was even a glint in Gates & Allen’s eyes. Since 1964 to be exact.

While many 8-bit versions of BASIC were derived from MS BASIC (1975) it was hardly Microsoft’s baby. Atari BASIC for example has zero to do with MS. Neither does TinyBASIC

BASIC itself is absolutely free. Certain implementations are not.

>The "bedrock of computer science" is machine code

It hasn't been machine code for at least two, maybe three decades.

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