Nothing like ignoring the spirit of the thing by turning it from one line to nearly a dozen.

Oh that -- I used to print those out from my C64 to my Star Micronics dot-matrix printer and add selected white-out / ink to make them more interesting.

It seems that the BASIC's of yesteryear still have a lot to teach us.

My favourite example is the annual BASIC 10 liner competition:

https://basic10liner.com/

Basically, folks compete to write the best, most interesting, most inspiring 10 lines of BASIC code imaginable .. and ooh boy, has there ever been some truly amazing stuff! A dynamically generated dungeon crawler, a full implementation of lunar lander, countless arcade-style games, an implementation of Brainfuck .. the list goes on and on .. all in just 10 LINES OF BASIC!

Another source of BASIC inspiration, I find, is in the synthesis one-liner scene - which of course, is dominated by the C64 for its synth goodness, but there are other examples out there where, in just a single line of code, entire techno and other electronic-music tracks are generated, on the fly, by ye' olde 8-bit computer of choice (C64, mostly, though..) The bytebeat techniques in use by some synth-one-liner hackers seem to be continually producing extraordinary results.

For example:

https://replicate.com/andreasjansson/synth-one-liner/readme

.. and a good treatise on the various techniques:

https://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/10/algorithmic-symp...

I think there is a lot of value in learning BASIC using these kinds of techniques in this day and age. I know for sure I'd struggle to have a full Lunar Lander or Asteroids implementation of just 10 lines of javascript, if that is even feasible .. but seeing so many BASIC implementations is just truly inspiring.

What we have lost in the rush for shiny bloat, eh folks?

The old adage that limits produce wonders, is never truer than in the 10 Line BASIC competition entries ...

There's a 300-page MIT Press book analyzing exactly this line of code: 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); :GOTO 10. It's free as a PDF and covers the mathematics (Truchet tilings), the C64 hardware, and the cultural history. The article doesn't mention it.