[nox100]

I grew up typing programs from softdisk magazine, Compute! etc... into TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 800, and C-64. I still think JavaScript in a browser is better.

JavaScript is way more powerful than Basic on any of those 4 platforms. The canvas 2D API is way more capable and easy than what came with those systems. Even getting something like

    <input type="text">

Was 50-150 lines of code in BASIC, by which I mean a text input line with a cursor and editing and not just BASIC's "INPUT" command which provided nearly zero editing support.

Libraries like pixi.js or three.js or p5.js etc make it trivial to get fancy graphics on the screen. Making something you can share it with your friends or the entire world with a link, even if they don't own the same type of machine running the same OS. Host them on codepen, jsfiddle, github pages, all free.

I loved my experience with Basic and those old machines but I wouldn't force my kids to learn that way.

[ikari_pl]

It's hard to compare these, it's like comparing a shovel to an excavator.

If a browser had to be implemented in 16 KB of binary, and use at most 48kB of RAM when running, many of the APIs you enjoy having would not be there. And it's not even about features of the language itself.

There was a time when you could have both - the language and the functionalities of a browser - IE supported VBScript in script tags:

    <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="VBScript">
    <!--
    Sub Button1_OnClick
       MsgBox "Hello world"
    End Sub
    -->
    </SCRIPT>

[bestouff]

Except it's way less discoverable. The BASIC prompt was all you got on some 8 bits computers, so it made playing with it almost mandatory. Also everything was way simpler (less abstractions layers, no network) to grok for a young kid.

[ikari_pl]

And all of your BASIC was in the manual, taught to you as soon as you bought the computer.

[nox100]

my experience was I would not have learned anything without a manual and examples. There was no autocomplete so there was no discoverabliy and there was no internet so unless you bought a book or happened to have access to a library that had modern basic books you were out of luck.

VS Today wheer there are 1000s of websites that will teach you JavaScript and 1000s of free video classes and hundreds of thousands of free examples. JavaScript is several orders of magnitude more discovable than basic ever was