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I started out in BASIC on an Apple II+ with my brother. I quit programming to become a musician (a fun move but made me poor)but I quit to become a programmer. When I was doing basic understood what was happening on a logical level but not much on a bit level. It at least sparked my interest. Fast forward 20 odd years, I have a masters in CIS and am just finishing out a masters in Vocation education. I teach HTML, JavaScript, ASP.NET, C# (oh no!), some diagramming (pseudo code etc), and finally some SQL to high school Jrs and Srs. The problem I come up with is that is that MS has some wonderful teaching resources while I have to consistently work on Java related material. I have a steep learning curve with Eclipse. But with visual studio I have free videos, books they can look up on the internet and other cool things- they are up and going in 2 days. With C# I do console programming to teach them logic and more "classical programming" as I call it. They learn arrays, polymorphism etc to teach coding by hand. I understand why you like basic but these cool IDEs and quick results provided by them is too seductive. Have you looked at MSDN EE? It is great!
