There's never been anything quite like Basic in the 1980s. It was everywhere and built in. For most users, it was programming. I wrote my first program on our

There's never been anything quite like Basic in the 1980s. It was everywhere and built in. For most users, it was programming. I wrote my first program on our family's Atari 800 computer. It was a budget machine with a mediocre, slow Basic, but it worked. Millennials are often surprised to learn that there were many Basic magazines with entire game programs printed in them. As a kid I would beg my mom to buy these magazines for me (much cheaper than buying real games), then meticulously type in the program. Inevitably, it would error out because of some typo, at which point I would have to pore over the code and find the problem. Learning how to debug at 9 or 10 years old! When I finally got the program running, I'd play it for maybe 5-10 minutes—the games themselves weren't usually very good or complex—then set about figuring out how I could cheat by changing the source code. When my family later bought a 386, I mostly played store-bought games on it and left Basic behind. But my high school was progressive and during my freshman year I took a yearlong Basic class, using QBasic. Suddenly the 386 I had in my room (after the family upgraded to a 486) became a Basic machine again! Basic set me down the path of a lifelong love of programming. First with Basic, then C++, and so on. The only thing I asked for for my 10th birthday was Borland C++. I was a weird kid. These days macOS comes with Ruby and Python interpreters built in, and learning resources are better than ever. But it's just not the same. The world has changed, and there are more idle distractions than anyone could experience in a lifetime. Programming is hard and the payoff is delayed and not guaranteed. How can it compete with YouTube or modern video games?