What if there was no BASIC in EndBASIC?

VB didn't fall out of fashion. Microsoft unceremoniously killed it and replaced it with VB.NET - a language nobody asked for. VB.NET has the verbosity of C# but with none of the benefits.

These days there's little incentive to learn VB because it's been dead for quarter of a century. And there's little point reviving it because anyone who wants a GUI will likely be working with web frameworks.

I did like VB, a lot. It was such a shame to see the abomination MS released with VB.NET. And that makes me all the more grateful that most languages these days are open. For example Perl 6 (now Raku) ended up taking a journey that fragmented the ecosystem, so dedicated and passionate Perl developers took on the mantel to continue the life of Perl 5

Wrote a basic interpreter in C/Wasm last year. Finished it, but in the end never posted it anywhere. While I started my dev journey with Basic as a child, I was quickly reminded why I moved to C as soon as I learned about it. Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project. I still enjoy C, sometimes ASM, but not basic anymore.

The VM is completely independent from the frontend. It also provides primitive functions interacting with the system, e.g. printing to console and drawing lines/circles, etc to different devices. It also implements an abstract VFS, which seems to be of a different concept comparing with the VFS in the kernel, because it is in user land. It is the frontend to tokenize and parse the language and call upon the VM to do something useful.

I think this is pretty common among compiler designs, except that most compilers don't implement drawing functions or user land file systems, while EndBASIC's does that -- if my assumption is correct. In essence it looks like a user land operating system.

But smaller than both.

I've recently been playing around with some of the old Logo implementations from the 80s and I've been really charmed by just how powerful and elegant that language can be once you've wrapped your head around it. It makes BASIC look barbaric by comparison.

Looking back on it, I don't think there was anything special about BASIC, from a modern point of view. Historically, yes, very significant language; that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that BASIC's justified reputation for being an "easy" language is very much the product of what the competition was.

On the small side of the computer space, the competition was assembly. Yeah, BASIC is easier than assembly. But that's not really saying much. On the large computer side you have some more competition with C and a handful of other viable languages, but they're all just terrible. You can't get a sense of what 1970s or 1980s C looked like by looking at a modern code base. C style has come a long way. The competition was even worse than it is today. (I'm also talking the "average" code base, not things like the annotated UNIX that does look pretty nice, but is also among the best of the best of the era.) Yeah, BASIC was easier than that, and again, that's not saying much.

It also sacrificed a looooot of capability for that easiness. We've built many languages since then that are easier than C without the massive sacrifice of capability. Some sacrifice, yes, but nowhere near as much. Having more computing resources available has not hurt, that's for sure.

By modern standards it makes a wide variety of terrible and/or baffling decisions. Even in its final form of Visual Basic .Net it was not a great language; if you target the earlier iterations which is where it earned its reputation it has even more baffling decisions. For instance, the memory model the language was built around was basically completely static allocation of everything. It's better to start with a good design then to start with a language that was built around that, then fixed up later.

Based on the author's description of the situation, the easiest and most natural choice is to stick Lua on it. It's a modern language, the AIs know it, there's abundant documentation for it every which way, it's already a de facto standard in the gaming space so the users can be learning skills they can take elsewhere in the space later. If anything the biggest disadvantage is the amount of documentation a user can find that is Lua, but bound to some completely different environment that might confuse the newbie, or written by some other novice giving terrible advice.

But my real point here is that I would tend to discourage starting with BASIC, and having kind of already started, I'd advise dropping it ASAP. It's not a very good building point in 2026 and there are a lot of good ones to choose from.