[COFF] A couple thoughts about BASIC

I was one of those 80s kids who grew up with 6502s with BASIC in ROM. Yeah, I learned some bad habits from that, but they weren't that hard to unlearn, and they, at the very least, got me screwing around with computers and figuring out how to make them do what I wanted. It's been my career for three and a half decades now, so I'm not gonna complain. A couple decades later we had PHP for the web, which did almost exactly the same thing: made the barrier to entry, for getting stuff you wanted to see on the screen actually show up there, really low. And yeah, a bunch of people wrote a bunch of terrible web pages, but at least some of them, I'll wager, got inspired by that to learn more and do better. Sneering at BASIC is exactly the same sort of irritating privileged-ivory-tower BS that The Unix-Hater's Handbook and the cult of ITS represent. Sure, in some perfect world, people would learn better habits and have access to more capable (and therefore grossly more expensive) machines, but in the world in which we actually live, a really-low-barrier-to-entry for smart kids without tons of money is a lovely democratizing force. Here endeth the rant. Adam