BASIC

Raised as a usability problem by 8 people on Hacker News over 17 years (2009–2025), in 9 threads.

People raised many different problems with BASIC, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 9 complaints

Programs relied on platform-specific commands the reader couldn't figure out how to replicate2025-04-13
Typos in hex DATA lines are very hard to locate2024-03-04
GOTO allows jumping around code, producing confusing spaghetti code2023-03-30
Coding ship subsystem firmware in BASIC was a nightmare and very slow2019-09-03
Inconsistent, magic syntax makes features like LINE and MID$ hard to remember2018-09-16
Generic Android text input is unsuitable and the view desynchronizes when editing large text2016-05-09
Setup is painful: Linux upload needs a tokenizer, the GUI is bad, and serial needs a special adapter2012-12-28
Serial cables incompatible, forced Windows VM, roughly 10 minutes per upload try2011-12-01
Installation and first run are full of pitfalls, and basic tasks require knowing PIC architecture2009-05-22