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BASIC was a terrible programming language to start out with, very painful to use. People who learned to program with it as their first experience paid the price for quite some time by having to unlearn bad habits. This is the main reason that its no longer around. The author of the article has a peculiar and maybe even arrogant sense of nostalgia to complain about its absence in the present day toolset for beginning computer programmers. I won't go through the long list of obvious and freely available alternatives for doing the job of BASIC on a home computer, but I expect any of the simple 10-line programs his son would want to type in would run almost verbatim in Python. And then the boy would know something useful.
