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That pretty much exists though. That's why Raspberry PI was invented and at the cost of $25 + a keyboard and mouse for the base model.

If you want to pick up programming as a hobby, a hobby computer exists. If you want to get more serious eventually you have to learn your tools.

Raspberry is a far cry from ben upton desired goal, this is not a matter of price, it is a matter of a full environment geared toward learning.

> Everything you need to program is just there. It just works, there's no extra installation, you start a program and start coding. And just about any PC has

You can get there today with some closed loop envirinments. But like wit QBasic and other Basics, there is very little commercially useful programming you can do there, unless it is an in-house application. See e.g. FileMaker Pro. Production grade web application programming is an order of magnitude more complicate than it was in 80s. Networking, client/server, graphical UI, responsive UI, dependencies with third party packages, multi user and multi tenancy come in my mind for example.

> These days you can probably do some Wasm magic to create an entire Linux OS in a browser tab, and install stuff in a virtual disk in the local storage.

That just sounds mindblowingly inefficient and pointless. There's no point making these great speed and efficiency leaps in CPUs if people just do inane stuff like this.

The browser is fine as it is. If you want to use it as an IDE, use something like codespaces or any of the online REPLs, don't try to make the browser an IDE?!

But QBasic etc. were just basic text editor with a "run" option. They didn't have many fancy IDE features. You didn't even have syntax highlighting most of the time. I don't think editing a html file locally is more painful than figuring out those tools back then. I would even argue that's a good place to start because a full blown IDE can also be really intimidating if you don't really know whats happening.

I seem to remember Microsoft removing qbasic from normal machines at some point in the 90s, either way it wasn't much use after windows 95 came out.

Visual Basic was essential in th e90s if you wanted to create a gui app, but it was a £500 piece of software you had to buy and install on top of windows.

Now sure, if you installed a standard linux desktop in the 90s you'd have things like gcc, perl etc built in, but you do today.

Nowadays you don't need a compiler for a lot of things, your interpreter is your browser which everyone has, you can just start up your text editor and create a html/js/css page, just like you could on your BBC Micro or Dos 5 machine and start creating a program by copying things out of a magazine. The standard debugging built into firefox and chromium is amazing compared to what you had with QBasic or the Spectrum 48k.

You've also got a realm of information on the internet available on how to start. If you do want to download something like Atom or VSCode it's three clicks away (literally you type "vscode" into ddg, click the first link, then click the deb)

If you want to program something even simpler from entirely in your browser you can pop over to Scratch or Purple Mash and build a game from the browser.

> How hard would be to have a default Firefox environment for budding coders?

Before the times of Firefox, Mozilla (the browser, not the company) actually did have something like that: Mozilla Composer[0]. Granted, it was a WYSIWYG editor and today no one writes entire websites that way anymore. But it still allowed basically anyone to start their own website – an idea which I still find very appealing as it's so close to Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a web where everyone is both a consumer and a producer. (Whether or not this vision was ever realistic is a different matter.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Composer

"A lot of you guys are hating on the author for not being able to figure out how to install Nodejs."

Nope. That's not what they're criticising.

"Yet if you're old enough to have gotten started in the time of JavaScript in the late '90s, or QBasic in the early '90s, or systems like the BBC Micro or TRS-80 in earlier decades, you should know what the author's talking about.

Everything you need to program is just there. It just works, there's no extra installation, you start a program and start coding."

Bash is 5000x more powerful and user-friendly programming environment than any version of rom BASIC ever was.

qbasic... well guess what? qbasic was not necessarily just there. It might be there. You have to type the command at a command line, and if it doesn't work, you have to investigate %PATH%

Bash kills basic hands down, as a programming language mind you, using only it's built-in features, forget the fact that it's also a wrapper around exec(), and it is right there exactly like the the old rom basics were.

How can I easily draw pixel with Bash? Easily inspect and modify the whole memory with it?

There should be an "educational" mode on every computer where you can just boot into it.

How can I easily make a tcp connection with basic?