This is my pet peeve with how they teach kids programming. Granted, I only have anecdata on that topic, gleaned from how they teach my own kid at school, but I

This is my pet peeve with how they teach kids programming. Granted, I only have anecdata on that topic, gleaned from how they teach my own kid at school, but I still can't shake the feeling that we're doing them a disservice by making them skip straight to JavaScript or Python. I wonder what it would be like if kids started with BASIC. And not Visual Basic or any other modern, structured flavor. No, I mean the ancient stuff: 10 PRINT "All your base are belong to us!" 20 GOTO 10 Limited in what it can do, simple to learn, with just enough fun stuff in it (like PLOT, DRAW, INKEY$, INPUT, etc.) Then go on to assembly language, again on some very limited and simple machine, along the lines of the good old ZX Spectrum 48 or Commodore 64. Then move on to something like C or Pascal. Or even Python and JavaScript if you want. But the idea is that going through BASIC and assembly, they'll learn two important things: 1) how computers actually work (even though it's super-simplified, it should still be useful), and 2) why you need structured programming. Or maybe I'm just being naive. I really would like to see if that works out, though.