[nickpsecurity]

Good article. Yet again, benefits of BASIC and Pascal kick in. Note that these are still maintained with idustrial-strength tools and IDE's available. Just gotta develop courseware that takes people through a series of problems incrementally learning the language while letting them ignore the rest of it. Gradually pick up both the features, thinking style, and good practices. Eventually can do the whole thing with the whole language and it's already a production language. :)

On a side-note, the questions the author asked were partly solved with efforts like Scratch. That project made a form of programming as easy as playing with Legos. What kids did from there was amazing. Might be lessons to apply in the adult tools.

https://scratch.mit.edu/