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An interesting article, on a topic that has troubled me as I've become part of the gray-haired programming set.
I know the same line of argument was made by those who worked with machine code or assembler and didn't have the benefit of a "high-level" language such as BASIC, but Mr. Brin is correct -- BASIC at least revealed the underlying logic of the system in a fairly transparent way.
That knowledge is already missing in a wide swath of working developers. The modern languages give them the power to create without understanding, which is fine, until something doesn't work. Another gift of BASIC was that it taught programmers how to isolate problems and debug them. Depsite the much more advanced debugging tools available, many developers lack the logic skills to employ them properly.
Perhaps the answer is an open source software project to create an OS-independent BASIC command line programming environment. It will give us old guys a chance to revisit our GOTO roots and maybe help seed the next generation of alpha geeks.
