> I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.

i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!

Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.