The thing is, there's nothing truly wrong with the conceptual design of BASIC, or even most BASIC langs. Just TI-Basic really, really sucks. Look at BBC Basic for the 83+ by benryyves if you don't believe me: It runs faster than Celtic III, and nearly as fast as axe for most operations. It also has sprite support, oh and dithering.

That's an issue for asm/axe programmers to solve. It tokenizes upon editing, to save space and increase speed, but it doesn't use TI's tokens, so the hex data would be a little unfamiliar. I thought of making an editor for it in BBC basic itself once, but unfortunately the line command 'can't' work inside a program due to the fact that programs have to be loaded into running ram before editing or exectution, so you can't load one inside another. The editor would need to be built into the OS and be written in asm, which is a problem as benryyves doesn't have BBC Basic z80's actual source: He has a binary blob with a wrapper, essentially, so it runs on the 83+.

Awesome article. I started with TI-BASIC myself. I remember seeing people playing games on their calcs in school and thinking "Man, that's cool, I gotta get one of those!". Then I discovered you could write programs on calc.

I got my start with TI Basic. I am the only programmer in my school. 83 series calcs are required for math classes. There are 2200 students in my school.
I see a problem here, how about you?

I had a similar issue at my school, although there were 1000 fewer students and someone else tried to code games once too. I was the only 83+ BASIC coder otherwise. Also I started programming with TI-83 Plus BASIC, in July 2001. I did some Visual Basic 6 at school in 2002-03 but that's pretty much it. I continued TI-BASIC afterward until late 2009, then switched to Axe in 2010, although I've quit programming althogether since then.

We should start a society to spred programming with passwords ad counter passwords and secret codes.

example: One club I know about has athing where you say,"Do you have change for a nickel?", and if the other guy says yes, then you know he is in the club too.

At my school, almost by definition filled with geeks, There is a whole major, for 50 people, of programming and web design. I am one of the three people in the school that are actually interested in programming. I am the only person who programs on calc. Just sad.
Do you have change for a penny?

Hmm I see. Is it also like if for example you go on a Starcraft strategy forum and someone trolls by asking if mass zergling is effective vs banelings and you respond "of course!" as sarcastic response?