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One thing I can't help but notice in reading all these letters is that the people who object the most to Mr. Brin's article are invariably programing experts, and that although they speak of Basic with contempt they all learned it extensively before anything else. One thing many of them may not fully appreciate when giving advice on perl, Python, and HTMl is how utterly arcane these things are to a layman. Basic represents the absolute ground level in terms of ease of access (it was right there when you turned on the C64, for God's sake!) and universal familiarity. You didn't need to worry about compiling it, and you didn;t need a computer expert to tell you where to download it from (at least until said experts read his article. My thanks for pointing out the availability of QBasic, by the way).
One other thing people may wish to consider is that, at least until the early 90's, basic was universal. I can imagine math books with Basic programming code. It is harder to imagine math books with python, perl, html, C, or (God help me) C++, because those languages are so much more arcane.
In other words, the hurdle can be cleared, but the bar has been raised too high for the beginners who have no easy source of advice. This is a significant point, and Mr. Brin ws right to raise it.
