I spent the summer of '83 at the GE Wilmington, NC nuclear fuels plant as the sole user of an HP 9845C with the integrated full size plotter. My job as a GA Tech ChE co-op student was to go around the plant with a rather simple gradient air sampling unit mapping out the airborne density of the various sizes of UO₂. I would take my overnight measurements (point a geiger counter at the different filter papers from the different levels) and enter the data into a program I wrote in... HP Basic. I would then feed that into another program I wrote in... HP Basic that plotted the densities as level plots in HPGL across a rather detailed for the time 2D map of the plant. It produced multicolor paper plots on full size drafting paper. My bosses, the physicists in the safety department, were very pleased. I was so happy doing this that I spent the evenings in the UNC Wilmington library learning level plotting algorithms. I needed more programming time so I would come in very early in the morning and have to remember to clock in at 8AM (overtime not allowed). All of us co-ops made $10/hr in '83, and I saved enough to pay for the entire next quarter at Ga Tech every quarter I spent working.

Weekends I spent at the beach, though.

I see from Wikipedia that the system costs were enormous! But that was an exquisite summer romance with BASIC.

Not too many years later I discovered Turbo Pascal. Yeah, off to the races. And then came Turbo C++, and g++ around '92. Haha you kids today would really enjoy debugging templates in early g++. (The idea that you could write the same code for 'float' and 'double' was intoxicatingly cool.)

The transition from Fortran (what I learned to program with) => HP Basic => Pascal => C++ was pretty easy. Pointers, well if you study 'The C Programming Language' carefully, are not difficult. People writing serious computational mathematics codes are constantly using pointers, just not as 'pointers'. Debugging, well that is another problem entirely, and I believe from way out here in the future, that that is the most difficult problem of all. How to program in such a way that the bugs are not silent. Those silent ones were the cause of most of the grief in my programming life.

The thing about HP Basic is none of the bugs were ever silent. Same with Turbo Pascal. I did a lot of really cool things with those 'toy' languages. They never caused me any grief.

So I think Dijkstra didn't understand (maybe) the importance of painless pleasure when (some) mortals are learning programming. It sure turned me on.