A few years later to the party, I distinctly remember copying listings out of the (excellent) user manual into my ZX Spectrum+ as a 5 year old. I am sure a thousand computer science lecturers would lambast BASIC for teaching people like me how to depend upon goto.
The spectrum got lemonaded by an argument over the joystick; replaced by the much more capable C64 a Christmas or two later. Admittedly, programming the 64 was a bit less accessible; no basic keywords for graphics functions etc. however that did give more of a "proper" road into dealing with the underlying hardware and dabbling with assemblers. Try explaining to your mum why you want to buy an assembler cartridge... To this day, I do enjoy winding up goto-haters over one of the more commonly used constructs in assembler, the humble JMP for most purposes can be thought of in same way.
I jumped to the Amiga 1500 not long after that; which as wonderful as it was, came with no programming tools (1.3 ditched AmigaBasic) so I got out of the loop for a little while. Did pick up AMOS Pro in the machines later years, which of course was incredibly easy to produce impressive stuff.
Computers in schools at the time were of course pitched at the how-to-drive a word processor level; and all rather a wasted exercise. (Is it any better now? I doubt it). The more involved bits of the BBC's computer literacy programmes glossed over in favour of shiny new GUI applications. (Though the Archimedes was, and still is amazing to use).
Very excited to see that Francois Lionet is working on a spiritual successor to AMOS. Big gap in the market for an accessible hobby language where you don't have to spend months figuring out what API's to use, or how to plug em together.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
