[lordalch]

Title should reflect that this was published in 2006.

And moreover, I don't think the article's point is true today. Python and JavaScript are both mature languages with massive libraries of online example code for anything you could want to learn about. You can get access to a JavaScript console with a single keypress in any desktop browser- F12.

Teaching kids to understand how to program has benefits, not just for the ones that go on to specialize in computing- I think about a journalist being able to use R or PyPlot to map out crimes in their city based on publicly available police reports, or a lawyer using a script to call the Shopify API to collect their client's records to respond to a discovery request, rather than taking screenshots of the web pages.

Exposure to BASIC doesn't help these people as much as more modern languages would.

[SQueeeeeL]

There's a bunch of really great talks from Johnathan Blow and GameHut (head of Traveller's Tales) about how it's simply impossible to draw a pixel on a screen in any modern computer language.

For all the endless fancy abstractions we have, the core truth of what must happen becomes lost and so people become slaves to the abstraction instead of masters of the truth.