I ended up also finding a No Starch Press book on JavaScript, and porting the BASIC listings to ye olde pre-Node JavaScript as my first foray into programming.
Then I also got a Commodore 64 on eBay some time later.
I definitely remember Creepy, Battle and Space.
But of course, your solution to that was twice as good for your education than if you’d learned only BASIC so that’s good.
My experience was kind of similar except I was learning in the mid 90s and only had access to various flavors of BASIC, because all the computers my school had were from 1980-1987 or so. When I saw modern GUI computers though, I couldn’t understand how what I’d learned in the character-based world could be applied to the GUI paradigm, so I gave up on programming until the Web and PHP gave me a usable mental model to get back into it.
lelanthran•37m ago
Still think my comment applies: they need to be updated for a modern platform (not Python).
fredrickleo•33m ago
chb•19m ago
lelanthran•7m ago
I can't really think of a suitable one TBH; Python's completely out of the running, Java and C# have a lot of unnecessary (for this goal) boilerplate, Pascal is not a bad choice.
Maybe Javascript? The books can then instruct "type this into an HTML file".
In my mind, a more modern platform would be a simulated one that has its own machine language (byte-code compiled, perhaps) so that these books, which take you all the way into machine language, would make sense.