Is BASIC still worth learning?

BASIC is a good toy for children.

HAHAHA! What a literal faggot!

well it is the foundation which Microsoft was built on
you can figure out how Microsoft built its empire by trying to understand what they were going for

An array variable like a in char a[10] is a pointer? That's not how I understand it, but maybe the next C draft made arrays even worse. In a sane language, it's an array, an object that contains 10 characters, and taking its address gives you a pointer to the whole array.

Of course there's decay. It's not an array anymore or even a pointer to an array, just a pointer to a single element, which you can access like an array because of a hack. The type is different, not that the average C weenie, or even an above average one, knows anything about the bullshit that is C types. In C there's brain-dead bullshit where a[i] actually means *(a + i), so you're actually doing *(a + i) even when a is declared in the same function.

C multi-dimensional arrays are broken. Having to reinvent wheels and remake important programming concepts from scratch because the language doesn't do it properly is a huge inconvenience, and it sucks even more because you can't pass a multi-dimensional array to another function without a bunch of bullshit. If C did arrays properly, the language would be smaller, have fewer corner cases, and not suck as much.

No, that's exactly right. Languages like Lisp, PL/I, Ada, and even the smallest versions of BASIC do much more than C does, but are much simpler in the areas that C has in common. This causes C programs to be more bloated, including machine code size, than programs in other languages. That's not the only thing that makes a language good, but considering how little C does compared to BASIC, let alone Lisp, the language has no reason to be so bloated and complex. C is complex because it's badly designed, not because has a lot of features. It doesn't even have a way to handle integer overflow or properly pass an array to a function.

There are many reasons why GNU Emacs is as big as it iswhile its original ITS counterpart was much smaller:- C is a horrible language in which to implement such thingsas a Lisp interpreter and an interactive program. Inparticular any program that wants to be careful not to crash(and dump core) in the presence of errors has to becomebloated because it has to check everywhere. A reasonablecondition system would reduce the size of the code.- Unix is a horrible operating system for which to write anEmacs-like editor because it does not provide adequatesupport for anything except trivial "Hello world" programs.In particular, there is no standard good way (or even any inmany variants) to control your virtual memory sharingproperties.- Unix presents such a poor interaction environment to users(the various shells are pitiful) that GNU Emacs has had toimport a lot of the functionality that a minimally adequate"shell" would provide. Many programmers at TLA neverdirectly interact with the shell, GNU Emacs IS their shell,because it is the only adequate choice, and isolates themfrom the various Unix (and even OS) variants.Don't complain about TLA programs vs. Unix. The typicalworkstation Unix requires 3 - 6 Mb just for the kernel, andprovides less functionality (at the OS level) than the OSsof yesteryear. It is not surprising that programs that ranon adequate amounts of memory under those OSs have toreimplement some of the functionality that Unix has neverprovided.

I've already seen 10 years of degenerates who think they're low level or sound because they use C.

Also here's something neat: a space-trading game in one (long) line of BASIC.
worldofspectrum.org/infoseekid.cgi?id=0019039

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Hey UnixHaterAnon, I have a question: Could Lisp machines do real-time DSP in their time?
I ask that because C/C++ and Fortran are the only high-level languages people use to do that, mainly because they aren't garbage collected, and all Lisp implementations I've heard of rely on a GC.
I would love to see a programmable guitar pedal with a Lisp interpreter/JIT compiler embed in it, but no one has done it yet because it doesn't seem to be a language suitable for that purpose, and I'm glad that C/C++ compilers allow us to mess with audio and video shit with their blast processing capabilities, so I'm not really sold on your UNIX hating tbh m8.

Is something that annoying loser would say.

Just because the file is one line does not mean that the program is one line. There are statement separators (:) everywhere.

What is Forth?
For a DSP, C/C++ and Fortran are just high-level assembly. In fact, they probably aren't using these languages at all, but rather a limited subset that looks like them, superficially. So, we can defined an "Embedded LISP", that probably doesn't have eval, so it could be aggressively compiled into code for an embedded processor (aggressive here meaning that it is compiled so as to have static memory allocation). No one has done this.

What did you mean by this?
Seriously, take github.com/VCVRack/Rack or github.com/topisani/OTTO for example, it is all pure modern C++.
Of course they don't use every single feature of the language, but doing that in C++ would be pure foolishness, since the whole point of it is to have a bunch of "zero-cost abstractions" at your disposal with a(n almost) seamless integration with C.

That said, yeah, I forgot about Forth and a Lisp dialect for DSP could probably be fine, even though I doubt that linked lists would be the right kind of data structure for that domain.