If you’d like to hear a boring but heart-warming story, ask a geek about how they learned programming. It’s like the opposite of trolling: you can instantly provoke tearfully-joyous nostalgia out of programmer strangers on the Internet by making this inquiry. Most of these stories will include some form of a programming language called BASIC, the Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code created in the 1960’s at Dartmouth. The Atari generation has now grown up, and so have programming languages. But I think this nostalgia is responsible for us holding onto an out-dated language like a ratty security blanket.

In another post, I wrote about how Python is the new BASIC, as in it should take up the mantle of being the iconic first programming language for kids to learn. The rising sun of Python should be a long-awaited welcome for a new generation of coders. In the early 2000’s, there seemed to be (at least from my perspective) a noticeable gap in kid-accessible programming that was filled with JavaScript, TI-82 calculator programming, and Visual Basic. These were languages suited for the world of software engineers, but it was hardly ideal for the kid software hobbyist. (more…)