The tablet point is a red herring. 8-bit micros were hardly portable. So discussions about whether or not you can code on iOS or OS X are tangential.<p>The real issue is <i>how easily</i> you can code. 8-bit micros hit the sweet spot. No system available today comes close.<p>You powered up the machine, and the first thing you saw was a BASIC line editor. There was nothing else to distract you. It was instant-on with no setup.<p>You <i>had</i> to write code to use the machine at all. You even had to write code - albeit one line - to load a game from a tape.<p>For the gifted, BASIC led naturally to machine code and to graphics made by writing bytes into memory.<p>No modern environment has anything like the same simplicity, directness, or sense of natural progression.<p>Xcode, gcc, anything with a build system (never mind a package manager) are insanely complicated in comparison. They&#x27;re so complicated professionals have to write books explaining them to other professionals.<p>Even Python - possibly the best candidate for a successor to BASIC - has a quirky IDE and two and a half different popular versions, and a lot of other complications that a BASIC cursor doesn&#x27;t.<p>JavaScript? You really have to learn CSS and HTML and jQuery and $(infinitely long list of frameworks goes here) and - oh look, is that the time?<p>There is a <i>huge difference</i> between encouraging programming by making access to it friction-free and trivially easy, with a learning space that&#x27;s comprehensibly small but not dumbed-down and toy-like, and making programming possible for users who don&#x27;t mind hurdling a lot of obstacles.<p>That first category is completely empty today. It shouldn&#x27;t be, but it is.