It’s slow. All those layers of abstraction exact their toll on latency, even on today’s monster systems.<p>Reading the essay, my heart goes out to the author: he missed all those wonderful years in the ‘80’s and the early ‘90’s cracking protections, swapping, coding intros, watching demos and competing on the Commodore64, Commodore Amiga and the ATARI ST. He missed out on all the wonderful memories and all the action. I’m saddened by it. He started out on an obscure platform and then switched immediately to a drab, boring, soulless PC bucket, never to experience the joy of the Scene.<p>For me writing software in BASIC under MS-DOS and later on Windows®️ was an afterthought, since I had already been proficient in MC68000 and MOS 6502 intro coding on Amiga and Commodore64. It was easy to do since I stumbled upon the complete, official reference manual on BASIC 3.0 from Microsoft and I already knew BASIC from learning it on the Commodore PLUS/4. The only piece of software I wrote was an ASCII survey points file to DXF converter which I then ported to VisualBASIC 2.0, and that because I also had the full AutoCAD book set which included full DXF format specification. It cut down our work from several hours to a few seconds, but BASIC on the PC had always been an afterthought for me, something I knew but never used much, or something to whip up a quick utility in and run it from a batch file wrapper.