Re: it was a joy to work in and ahead of it's time for creating structured code
You're not wrong, but I'd say, horses for courses. As in, the Beeb and their BASIC was years ahead of what was on offer for comparable markets and users at the time. C64 BASIC wasn't up to much if I recall and you certainly weren't getting any of that inline assembler goodness, or rich documentation. And all this out of the box, with Mum and Dad not having to spend a penny more to get little Johnny and Jane started on this new-fangled computing thing.
The get-started-for-cheap-n-easy thing shouldn't be underestimated. I'd posit that Modula-2 and suchlike were not cheap or easy at the time and it wasn't until Borland Turbo Pascal and Zortech C came out on the PC at the bargain price of $29.99 that there was a comparable replacement on the PC.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
