Dropping into assembly and making direct system calls were exactly the sort of things that were of BASIC's time. These are operations oriented downward toward the layer of Von Neumann architecture.
It's virtual machines and garbage collection that are the stuff of today...and of course yesterday as well. But the reason for their popularity is that a quest for 7ever more sophisticated abstractions is the impetus behind most programming languages. It's
39 -> JMP -> GOTO
that gets us multiple dispatch. None of which is to say that languages with REPL's or even only with REPL's [aka interpreters] aren't a great tool for learning...better than IDE's in my opinion...then again so are text editors, but that's a story for another day.
It's virtual machines and garbage collection that are the stuff of today...and of course yesterday as well. But the reason for their popularity is that a quest for 7ever more sophisticated abstractions is the impetus behind most programming languages. It's
that gets us multiple dispatch. None of which is to say that languages with REPL's or even only with REPL's [aka interpreters] aren't a great tool for learning...better than IDE's in my opinion...then again so are text editors, but that's a story for another day.