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I truly miss BASIC

I could whip up a few lines of code and actually DO something creative with it.

Trying to get sOmething going with C++ etal is like climbing out of the water and crawling up the cliff at DOVER.

Back in the primordial days of coding, when I majored in Electronic Data Processing in college (yes, there was such a major), I interned for the director of the college computer department. One of the prerequisites to move on to courses in COBOL, Assembler, FORTRAN, and RPG II (have I carbon dated myself yet?) was to pass CompSci 101, which included BASIC programming. The campus mainframe was an old NCR system that was run by punch cards and tape drives. Access was restricted to old 'Jetsons' terminals which required a multi-phase logon. Sometimes you had to wait for hours to get a tractor-feed printout of your program results put in your mailbox at the campus complex, which consisted of a bank of old, 1930's-style mail slots with wristwatch spin locks on the doors. One day, I logged on and sent a program in BASIC to the mainframe, and the resulting readout I was expecting was something like 'Hello there!', or some other simplistic nonsense. I mean, hours of syntax-free coding by hand for something that silly. It never came, but when I showed up at my desk outside the director's office a couple days later, I was informed by him that someone had apparently inputted a logon code that the mainframe didn't understand because two alpha-numeric symbols had gotten transposed, and after an investigation, the culprit was me. The entire campus mainframe crashed and it took them a full day to purge the system and restart it. It goes without saying that I was persona non grata after that, and I delayed my entry into full-time IT for over another decade, until I exorcised the demon haunting my past. The good news was, coding sucked and desktop and network support was a much more preferable environment for me.