I found this article sophomoric.

cgside, I agree, it is excessively dismissive of Fischer, prejudging him as a paranoid yet completely glossing over the fact that the US, rather than honouring him as the world champion he was, played every trick in the book to try and hang him for "breaking sanctions".

Uh, breaking sanctions by playing... a chess match! Hardly worth rotting in Federal prison over. It seems Fischer's case can be summarised as "It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you." I hope he is as happy in his adoptive country as you are.

Cary seriously needs to take some time off and get his personal shit straight and stop giving people such horrible, horrible potentially life-fucking advice. Doesn't he have editors who are keeping an eye on him?

I agree with you and other writers that Cary's "off the rails" with this advice (and a couple of others recently), and he does need to take a timeout. However, editorial censorship really isn't the answer.

I don't think it's appropriate for an editor to veto columns that don't smack of a wholesome family-values vibe (I'm describing it that way to illuminate the slippery slope involved here)... By all means review the columns, run past a psychologist, propose administrative leave, maybe even fire him if Salon isn't comfortable with the angle, but censoring on a column-by-column basis wouldn't be fair to him or his readership, IMHO. Or more obviously brand the column as a no-holds-barred "here's what I think" arena, instead of a "take this and you'll feel better in the morning" concept.

I recall Cintra Wilson's agony column right here in the old Salon. She had her high-octane rants and wasn't afraid to tear correspondents into tiny pieces to be reassembled by others later. Around here, in this day and age, it would be considered terribly un-P.C. God, I miss her. :)

As a software professional (who started with BASIC, since that was mostly all there was, but moved to assembler, Pascal, C, as soon as I could get my hands on them), I agree with other posters here: "BASIC is gone, and good riddance" (geophile).

I also echo the sentiment that Python, Ruby, even PHP and JavaScript are of greater pedagogical value. There is not a high barrier to entry, although it superficially "seems" so, and dwelling on this point indicates the shallowness of Brin's analysis.

I don't think the problem is in access to technology; the problem - again, other posters got here first - is in attitudes to learning "from the ground up". I've found many adult professionals who were simply uninterested in what makes the infrastructure tick - that their lifestyle and jobs depended on. That's fine; it just guarantees an ecological niche for the geeks. I know many of them, and I share many geek traits.

If Brin's son is "tantalised", then suggest he builds a web site (for example). After learning static markup he'll quickly get the hang of PHP.

If he's as "tantalised" as I was, he'll be programming in Xlib or Cocoa or GTK within a year.

Parents - even geek parents like me - should remember that it's quite possible their child isn't one of them, and doesn't need to understand the machine at the machine code level. Maybe they only want to check their mail, reliably and securely message their friends, draw in Photoshop, or edit their band's demo reel in iMovie.

Nobody is surprised when an assembly programmer doesn't want to drop down to soldering TTL circuits. Nobody is surprised when a C programmer balks at writing assembler. Nobody is surprised when a SQL DBA draws the line at writing Perl. The temptation to micromanage the machine is too often exercised in the commercial environments I see. Let kids be exposed to HLLs and VHLLs and good application user interfaces. Let them understand a web site from the "does it afford the user" perspective rather than worrying about counting cycles and microsecond latencies. There is too little attention to human-computer interface and too much "use C dude, Ruby is too slow".

The true impediment to computing civilisation is Microsoft. Step number one, buy your son/daughter an iMac G5 and bring them into the 21st century - or at least show them some of the magnificent alternatives - and you'll give them an intellectual and vocational independence worth having. If nothing else, they'll learn that there's more to computing life than crashes, viruses and cold, dead, closed minds.

To Jim Rootham: The emulator you're looking for is simh (http://simh.trailing-edge.com/).

roadknight, you couldn't have read many. Squeak and Logo have been mentioned several times.

So was LambdaMOO. And lots of other good suggestions...

Mathematica would be another possibility, if only it were free - an ideal teaching language which could cover the needs of several parts of a school curriculum. The notebook presentation format is a perfect medium for introducing the concept of computer-created graphics, sound and animation.

Come to think of it I'm surprised Wolfram Research isn't already in the K-12 space.

It was nearly 20 years ago when I first met Smalltalk-80, but I still remember those heady days of infatuation, when I was convinced "this is how programming languages and even operating systems should be". Smalltalk-80 was Mrs Robinson to my idealistic Benjamin Braddock.

Skimming Keith Fieldhouse's article[1] on O'Reilly OnLAMP.com, I had flashbacks to that old fling.

As several other posters have speculated - could a Smalltalk visual environment be a conceptually ideal basis for teaching programming to children?

[1] "Smalltalk for Everyone Else", http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2006/09/21/learning_smalltalk.html

Long before "American Idol", reality TV, and all that garbage, Susan Faludi's book "Stiffed" charted America's road to a society that believes life is a lottery ticket, that celebrity is the only thing worth having, and work, knowledge and authenticity are pointless.

Oprah continues the awful de-civilising work of Murdoch and Hollywood, but one fears the nadir is not yet reached.