[ssharp]

I understand the thinking behind some of this but I don't think it's right. My first language was GW-Basic so I grew up and enjoyed this era. However, if I want to start working on Javascript today, all I need to do is open a browser and start playing around in the console or set up a directory to point my browser to.

You don't need NPM, Github, Vite, React, etc. to do any of that. I'd also say the vast amount of documentation, sites like Codecademy, seemingly infinite amount of Youtube videos, etc. accelerates learning light years beyond what we had with GW-Basic, assuming you even had this reference guide!

[pipes]

JavaScript is a painful first language, full of gotchas. Even worse code bootcamps introduce it with react. I always recommend anyone starting programming to just make command line programs at the beginning in something like python. I might be wrong but at least it introduces a fundamental universal programming tool.

[dxbydt]

You are deliberately missing the point and confusing X with ‘something that looks like X’. For eg., using QBasic, you can pick some random spot on the monitor and have a white dot show up at that spot. What you end up doing is directly writing to the vga buffer address of that spot. That’s the X. You can directly talk to LPT1 and directly get the dot matrix printer to print an ascii character. That’s the X. All these things were possible because the synergy between the hardware and the software was extreme. QBasic was just a shim. You were directly talking to the hardware in as few steps as you possibly could. The assembler code for your BAS file could be inspected and you could even muck with that.

All of that has gone out the door. What you have with javascript is something that looks like X. So I can use a html canvas element and get its drawing context and do an arc with the right parameters and fill and hide the scrollbar with some css and pretend that what you now see is like the X. But its not! To actually get rid of the browser window and only have the white dot, you would need a full blown electron install or worse. And it still wouldn’t get you to the X. We already had X. Now we have something that barely approaches X after a great deal of effort.This is supposed to be progress ?!!