Comment by int_19h

I can't speak for COBOL and Logo... but Java, really? When you're looking at a hello world program in it, 80% of it doesn't make sense to someone not familiar with the concept - import? class? static? void?

BASIC is even worse in many respects. It starts being deceptively simple, but do you think that someone looking at these two lines:

   PRINT a, b;
   PRINT a; b

would be able to tell the difference? Or, say, what does this do?

   LINE (0, 0) - (100, 100),, BF 

(no, it doesn't draw a line)

And then if we're talking about classic BASIC, you have to remember that A% is integer while A$ is string etc. None of that is at all obvious.

Or, say, you see this:

   NAME x AS y

A reasonable guess would be that it renames a variable, or maybe creates an alias, right? But no - it actually renames a file with a name corresponding to a value in variable x, to a new name corresponding to a value in variable y. And many BASIC dialects will even helpfully stringize it for you, if the variables were, say, integers.