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Read other letters about this article
I see many others reacted the same way I did when reading this article: Lord, what nonsense. I think this quote (from a letter) wins the prize, though:
"Teaching your kid basic first is like teaching them how to stumble so that they can learn how to dance."
Indeed.
What's more, there is no lack of BASIC interpreters in the world. Learn to google. Check freshmeat.net, and other repositories of free software.
But, really! BASIC? No one codes BASIC today because its one and only virtue was that it would fit in a few thousand bytes of read only memory. It is a horrible language that succeeded mostly in teaching very, very bad coding habbits to a generation of programmers. It was never a "standard". There were no two implementations that were the same. Any competent teenage programmer of that era used BASIC only until they learned assembly, or saved enough to buy a pascal compiler.
I can't imagine what Brin wants that isn't available in a modern scripting language. There are any number of great options. What's more, the amount of documentation and support available online is incredible. It is vastly easier to learn to code today than it was in the era of BASIC.
