I think I pretty much agree about all of those changes except for &quot;the work necessary to get something to display on a screen&quot;. This was much less in BASIC on machines like the Atari 400&#x2F;800, Commodore 64, Apple ][, and IBM PC that could boot into a BASIC interpreter. Then you could turn on the machine, type<p><pre><code>  10 PRINT &quot;HELLO, WORLD&quot;
  RUN
</code></pre>
and see something on the screen.<p>In more recent environments you have a text editor and IDE or shell, which likely introduce more steps (even the concept of saving your code in a file!). I&#x27;ve also seen people worry about how much harder it can be to make a program display graphics compared to the BASIC era (which generally had built-in language primitives to go to graphics mode and start drawing stuff, which may at least require importing a library in contemporary languages and maybe <i>installing</i> a library).