As part of my work on "K" I'm re-reading the Commodore 64 Programmer's Reference Guide. This morning most of what I read covers the BASIC language.
What jumps out at me reading this is how the keywords of BASIC are oriented towards things a person actually wants to do with the computer. This is distinct from the keywords or functions of other languages which tend to be more oriented toward the language's features itself.
The difference can be subtle, but once you've worked with a few programming languages it's easier to spot.
I don't know if this is a unique feature of Commodore BASIC, or if BASIC is this way in general, but it makes a lot of sense for the programming language of a personal computer to be oriented toward the ideas, concepts and applications that a person who isn't a computer scientist might care about.
It would be easy to call this out and say that BASIC does a crappy job of this, but that wouldn't be fair without considering the constraints that BASIC, especially the BASICs than were essentially the entire operating system of the 8-bit microcomputers of the 80's were operating under. The fastest CPU's of the time clocked in around 1MHz, memories ranged from 4-64k (later a whopping 128k!) and the most common form of storage was cassette tape (if any at all). Under these constraints, BASIC provided a language that was comprehensible to people with no training or experience and allowed them to utilize all the resources of these machines for both fun and practical applications.
Today the answer to democratizing technology seems to always be adding complexity, and one of the most common refrains I hear from botlickers is that LLM's make programming accessible to everyone. That claim alone is dubious for a number of reasons but setting that aside, it's also flatly incorrect. BASIC enabled more people to program than any AI has, and it did it with the most meager computing resources that most people could afford to own, not rent. If the objective is to make it easier for people to make their own software, to make the computers they spend so much time and money on truly their own then the answer isn't going to come from billionaires and datacenters, it's coming from people who care about other people, and likely, it's going to start in a garage.
Jason J. Gullickson, 2026