The most widely used version of Basic which these platforms used does not have functions. This makes Basic programs tend to spaghetti and unreadable code, especially considering the constant memory constraints of those platforms. I grew up on these systems, and every time I think back on it I wish something like Forth would have taken its place – i.e. something with a clean and scalable pattern for abstraction. Basic, on the other hand, doesn't do abstractions. It barely has data types and what it calls “functions” are an even more limited form of Python's style of lambdas; every subset of code which can actually do something looks like “GOSUB 11600” when you call it. No naming, no abstractions, nothing. (No parameters or return values, only global variables.)

(This is in some ways even worse than assembler, which usually has labeled goto’s.)

When I programmed in Basic those many years ago, I was stalled when my programs reached a certain level of complexity. I was then mostly halted in my education and development as a programmer for many years, because the language did not make program composition easy. It was not until I had the opportunity to learn other languages with did have proper functions and other methods of program composition that I could break through the barrier, so to speak.

(Reportedly, BBC Basic on the BBC Micro did have proper named functions, and later versions of Basic like on the Atari ST and Amiga also had them. I believe that those versions of Basic would have been vastly more productive and taught people the usefulness of abstracting things as you go, building ever higher abstractions, etc. But this is never the version of Basic which people talk about, or used by all those listings in magazines, etc. These are, for all intents and purposes, not the “80s style Basic” which everybody remembers with such apparent and baffling fondness.)

(Mostly a repost of previous posts of mine, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25014279)