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Granted BASIC was the first largely used language kids learned on but also remember that c was the first language to be used on cross platforms. BASIC is also very good for the educational purposes but teaches bad programming languages. Remember in the beginning of OS' Unix was first and not ms or apple. Alot of people tend to forget that and forget about the Mabell labs. Now I do agree with you about the whole situation in dealing with kids not learning to code nor being able to. Great idea getting the commodore 64, but another perspective is think of what the real revolution that came with the dawn of the Unix environment. Such a radical change in the way the world functions was due to the onslaught of the enterprise world. Eric S. Raymond and Richard M. Stallman would be perfect people for your son Ben to read some of their articles on programming. They are the back to basic kind of guys but with C of course. These guys also started FSF(free software foundation) and GNU so they are very reputable developers. I know alot of people over look Unix or any *nix today but it is used in almost every idea that takes off. Even Microsoft tries to take some pages from it as well, lol. Programming is a fun and exciting career and lifestyle but to obtain the innovation like you stated we must embrace the past. We have to know where we are coming from to know where we are going. Have a wonderful day.
