Nobody's arguing that it isn't easier today for the professional, but that doesn't really lower the barrier of entry for the barely interested. Never mind that

Nobody's arguing that it isn't easier today for the professional, but that doesn't really lower the barrier of entry for the barely interested. Never mind that we simply orders of magnitude more people with computers now, so that even with a drastically lower percentage of people actually starting some kind of dev environment we'll just have to come out on top. Yes, it's easier to create the good stuff (well, at least web stuff and mobile apps…), but I'd doubt that it's as easy to create silly crap that you're inordinately proud of. That may be nothing more than a simple question/answer loop, but even with that you created something and you understand some basics of how a program operates… "Why Johnny can't read" was about literacy, not everyone going out to be a journalist or Hemingway. I view Brin's piece in the same light. But yeah, we really shouldn't get lost too much in nostalgia. Things aren't that bad and projects like the Raspberry Pi show that this subject is tackled today. For me, the lesson to learn from BASIC environments aren't about forcing people to relive that nowadays, but that the programs that resulted out of the very first days with such a computer are interesting for educational purposes.