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I totally agree with your basic premise that today's kids need a good, simple development environment - provided by BASIC in our day (the '80s for me, at least). I was programming a TI99-4A (with a tape drive) in 1979 when I was only eight. By 1983, when I was in 6th grade, my father had the foresight (or maybe just dumb luck) to provide me with an IBM-PC with BASIC ROM - or better, BASICA if I decided to boot with the MS-DOS V1.1 5-1/2" floppy. I had a big bulky IBM BASIC manual that described all the syntax much like a UNIX man page. When I programmed arrays I developed basic working knowledge of vector and matrix algebra; when I wrote the code itself I learned basic algorithms, structure, and logic. By 8th grade I knew my work would involve writing code.
Where did it get me? I'm now a PhD Mechanical Engineer who uses perl, C, and (shudder) FORTRAN 90 daily to perform tasks from the very arcane to the next-to-impossible without code – occasionally in a UNIX environment, no less. I feel like one of the few engineers around that has the capability to write code to perform analysis. Code helps not just with numerical and analytic work but with data collection and analysis aspects of experimental research. In other words, automation can help anything.
As an educator, I see the next generation (those 10yrs younger than me or more) coming into engineering school without knowledge of the basic skill to perform numerical analysis: being able to write code. They are typically afraid of a command line too, although you can often get more done there than within a GUI. It is a shame - but maybe I'm just an old grouch? I think these skills are still very useful. I still have qbasic tucked away on a tape somewhere, and when my daughter is old enough to use a computer, she’s going to have to learn it the way I did. Maybe she'll get a Linux box first. ;)
