Commodore BASIC actually was my first experience with a scripting language (and my first experience doing any programming at all a few years before).
When I was about 12, or thereabouts, I operated a BBS that ran the Color 64 BBS software, which was an assembly core with BASIC scripting. The assembly core made it just fast enough to serve out to a 2400 baud modem, and the BASIC scriptability made it really easy to add new games and features, and without having to restart the whole system (BASIC with line numbers allows overwriting of lines by using the same number...so, it's like a LISP machine...if you squint really hard, and hit yourself in the head a few times). The fact that a program could be both BASIC and assembly was something altogether novel to me. Of course, now I know that UNIX guys had been doing it for years, but at the time I'd only ever seen programs written entirely in assembly or entirely in BASIC. Never one that was a seamless combination of the two.
I still have the Color 64 manual and floppy disk. It was hand-bound and printed on a dot matrix printer. I could never bring myself to get rid of it, in the numerous cleanings over the past 20 years. And I think the reason is that it taught me something that has stuck with me all these years (that one should use the right tool for the job--not necessarily the one that is "fastest" or most popular or the same as everything else in the toolchain).
Now that I think of it, I'm wondering if it actually extended the BASIC syntax (making BASIC a DSL for BBS software, of sorts), or if it just did the networking in assembly and rerouted standard IO from BASIC to the modem. If the former, I think I owe some more props to the author of Color 64 (above and beyond the $50 I paid for the software 20 years ago...though that was when $50 meant something...it'd be like six grand in today's dollars).
When I was about 12, or thereabouts, I operated a BBS that ran the Color 64 BBS software, which was an assembly core with BASIC scripting. The assembly core made it just fast enough to serve out to a 2400 baud modem, and the BASIC scriptability made it really easy to add new games and features, and without having to restart the whole system (BASIC with line numbers allows overwriting of lines by using the same number...so, it's like a LISP machine...if you squint really hard, and hit yourself in the head a few times). The fact that a program could be both BASIC and assembly was something altogether novel to me. Of course, now I know that UNIX guys had been doing it for years, but at the time I'd only ever seen programs written entirely in assembly or entirely in BASIC. Never one that was a seamless combination of the two.
I still have the Color 64 manual and floppy disk. It was hand-bound and printed on a dot matrix printer. I could never bring myself to get rid of it, in the numerous cleanings over the past 20 years. And I think the reason is that it taught me something that has stuck with me all these years (that one should use the right tool for the job--not necessarily the one that is "fastest" or most popular or the same as everything else in the toolchain).
Now that I think of it, I'm wondering if it actually extended the BASIC syntax (making BASIC a DSL for BBS software, of sorts), or if it just did the networking in assembly and rerouted standard IO from BASIC to the modem. If the former, I think I owe some more props to the author of Color 64 (above and beyond the $50 I paid for the software 20 years ago...though that was when $50 meant something...it'd be like six grand in today's dollars).