I've been thinking about this recently when teaching my daughter to program. What was very different about BASIC compared to today was that it was "Beginners'

I've been thinking about this recently when teaching my daughter to program. What was very different about BASIC compared to today was that it was "Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code" (that's what BASIC stands for). At the same time it used to be used by adults to solve real world problems. If you outgrew BASIC you could easily segue into Pascal which was much more powerful but still designed with education in mind. I think today the gap between what is used to teach and what is used to solve problems is much bigger. Once children get older the motivation for toy languages understandably goes away but learning a modern programming language that is actually used in the industry is a big step that is not easy to overcome. I have no perfect solution for that but for us and for now we settled for Godot and GD Script. It is simple enough to get started and I think when I showed my daughter the Tesla App [1] it was a big motivation. [1] I've heard the current version it is not made in Godot anymore, but it was when we started on this journey a while ago.