Action was the best 8-bit programming language

This article doesn't really prove why it's the best. I feel like if it's the best it would have been ported to more systems.

I think it hinges on:

  The Action! language may not have been as advanced as C or Pascal, but because it was designed with the 6502 CPU in mind, compiling the language was astonishingly fast.

  The original Atari Pascal system from APX needed multiple disk drives and could take several minutes to compile a small program. The only C package available in 1983 (Deep Blue C) was at least as limited as Action!, but also not an integrated package and compiled slowly. Draper Pascal only compiled to pseudo-code.

  Action! compiled your program to machine code in memory and in seconds. Typing C (to compile) and then R (to run) was hardly slower than just typing RUN in BASIC.

So less about the language itself (unless it had some particular properties that facilitated compiling it quickly) and more about the tooling.

Micro-SPL was cut down from the HP SPL systems programming language to run on the Xerox Alto, in microcode, and was ported pretty directly to the 6502 as Action! The Action! folks were pretty coy about this back in the eighties.

I missed the "was" in the title. In the last 40 years a lot has progressed, so I don't think Action would be the best anymore.