"Well I don't give a damn about my bad reputation."

[PhilOfPerth]

Sadly a lot of it was brought about by M$. A lot of it was going from BASCOM to QuickBASIC/BASIC PDS to VBDOS to VB for Windows. There are a lot of folks around who remember how it was like to do stuff on an 8-bit computer which help maintain the "bad reputation" in the opinion of others who want it to run fast, who want to be seduced by the eye, who needs to get the latest technology... for bragging or anything else. It's not just BASIC, it's other programming languages. There must have been a lot of resistance to what was added to C in particular, according to the "gcc" manual on chapter 5 or 6 "Extensions to the C language". Defending C code in K&R style could be as ornerous as trying to run BASIC code, which has not much more than "INPUT", "PRINT" and "GOTO", anyhow on 64-bit systems.

BASIC PDS v7.1 had ISAM built in but didn't go anywhere. It was one attempt for in-house support for databases or something else for office. It must have lost favor to Word Basic, something I suddenly discovered reading PC MAGAZINE in the late 1990's...

I program in Lua a few times. A lot of code written for v5.1 and earlier has to be rewritten for the latest v5.4 if it must do heavy processing with integers such as checking out bits or creating WAV files. In the earlier release had to use "bit32" module, but in v5.4 must mess around with:

https://www.lua.org/manual/5.4/manual.ht...ing.unpack

P.S. There is an awful lot of hating on "LET". On Timex Sinclair you had to use "LET", there was no other choice. It was how the computer worked. No I didn't actually have one, I discovered this in a BASIC programming book for children. I didn't like the "joke" offered about it by the previous maintainer of the QB64 wiki... he could have at least offered a link to Wikipedia about the British computer.

@mnrvovrfc I cut my teeth on Sinclair basic, and I reckon it was very impressive (for the time). It was very nostalgic for me to hear this mentioned again. Wow, how things have changed!