30 years later, QBasic is still the best
<i>>to realize that in more than 30 years, we have not been able to come up with something better for our kids: Qbasic ..., but we have never really made a simpler or more direct access to the thrill of programming than QBasic. </i><p>First, I think it's really cool that he's exposing a young mind to programming.  But I'm also old enough to have installed QBasic from floppy disks and part of me thinks his statements I quoted are romanticizing QBasic a little bit.<p>I think that Javascript in today's browser is a fine substitute.  I've had good experience with children that age by going to the browser, pressing F12, go to Console tab and start typing code.  It can start as simple as:<p><pre><code>  alert("hello world");
</code></pre>
And boom, you get a popup.  You can also show the kid he can type in arithmetic stuff like "2+3" and he'll get back the answer 5.  You can then show him how to <i>modify</i> the existing web page.  You can ramp up a slight bit of complexity by showing how to create a text file and writing Javascript and then having the browser run it.  The 8-year olds I've seen can handle this no problem.<p>What I like about the Javascript-for-kids approach is that it shows them that programming isn't some other universe where you install QBasic in a vm.  Instead, the initiation into programming/experimentation is just 2 keystrokes away.  There's something about the immediacy of F12-Javascript that keeps it from being an esoteric dark corner.  The kid can also get more mileage out of his "programming" knowledge because he can use his Javascript console tricks at his friend's house on any web browser.  On the other hand, playing with QBasic today is more isolating.  The use of QBasic in 1980s had more utility because the syntax of '10 PRINT "HELLO"' also worked on Apple II, Commodore 64, Radio Shack TRS-80, Texas Instruments TI-99, etc.