> Forty (40) years ago, children were writing assembly on home computers
Last time I checked, the majority of those kids were using BASIC. Specifically: Commodore BASIC or QBasic (DOS).
And Javascript is the modern version of BASIC: widely supported, well integrated into all modern OSes (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop), and capable of doing all of the graphics that a modern nascent programmer wishes.
BASIC is closer to assembly than JavaScript, both in complexity and that you can't implement a JavaScript anywhere as simply as you can implement BASIC
I wasn't talking about BASIC, I was talking about assembly.
Assembly wasn't that hard on those old things, so why is so much time spent today shoehorning JavaScript into places it shouldn't go? Spend that effort on something useful, or at least something sane.
And I'm talking about BASIC, which spawned a generation of programmers. PIC-BASIC, QBasic, TI-83 BASIC, Commodore BASIC. That's how programmers got their start back in the 80s.
> Assembly wasn't that hard on those old things
Assembly is harder than BASIC, and its harder than Javascript.
You can go to any store and pick out a beginner Javascript book these days. But how many Assembly tutorials or books are there?
Back in the 80s, it was more about Commodore BASIC books being distributed with the Commodore itself: ftp://www.zimmers.net/pub/cbm/c64/manuals/C64_Users_Guide.pdf
Pre-internet, it was books like these that allowed programmers to learn and grow.
Last time I checked, the majority of those kids were using BASIC. Specifically: Commodore BASIC or QBasic (DOS).
And Javascript is the modern version of BASIC: widely supported, well integrated into all modern OSes (phone, tablet, laptop, desktop), and capable of doing all of the graphics that a modern nascent programmer wishes.