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I agree with the author on most of his points. I learned programming with basic when I was about 13, back around '93 or so. Hours of fun and obsession with programming followed. A year or two later I moved on, but not before creating all those pong, breakout, etc. games in basic and loving it.
I used qbasic, which used to come standard with DOS back then. It took me about 20 seconds to find a site with the qbasic download. I downloaded it and ran it: it's one .exe file if you don't count the help file. It provides and environment to do line by line basic and then even move into subs and functions when one is ready. You can create, run, and even debug the program in one place. Perfect for learning the basic building blocks of coding. True, it's not longer included as standard on today's machines which is a shame since the whole program is about 300k, but it's still accessible to those that want it.
So as far as the argument that you couldn't find a simple way to program in basic goes, it's simply not true. Qbasic's been around for years. It worked for me when I was 13. I don't see why anything would change now--the software sure hasn't.
