Ha, when I was a kid, my father tried to teach me C and I found out that the serious game programmers used asm! C was wasteful; a few years later it was what everyone used but not on systems I liked; starting with the MSX and then moving to then Amiga, I was writing games on both and even for the latter, C was a very dirty word in the time I worked on it. Even if it was 'C', it was chock-full of inline asm. When I moved to PC software, indeed it became C and then C++.

Boot rpi, launch scratch. Granted, that's one extra step. But after the first boot you just set scratch to auto launch.

And even if there were, the alternatives are numerous. It's not a choice between playing the same old game for the 100th time and writing your own (from a magazine), it's a choice between a world of information carefully crafted by millions of experts to take your attention and provide you with those quick-win endorphinns in exchange for showing you adverts for things you don't want.

Computing in the 80s and 90s was a much more personal thing, today it's a war.

I started using computers much more recently, but wouldn't any OS that boots into a TTY provide a pretty similar experience? I'm genuinely curious since I've never used a Commodore or BASIC. Is that environment much different from bash or another shell?

Booting into BASIC is the equivalent of booting into an IDE. But one that a child could understand with a single page of instructions.

It's kind of hard to explain because computers were so simple that you didn't really need a shell.

But as someone who was there as a kid, I can say with certainty that there is no way I'd have been able to write a shell script back when I was writing BASIC programs that had loops and graphics.

There are a much smaller number of special non-obvious tricks or special syntax to know in basic, while most of bash's features are invoked by arcane special syntax.

It's not necessarily easier to get something done in basic, but it's easier to understand what to do, and easier to read someone else's program and follow what does.

There must be more to it than the features of any language itself too. Many versions of basic are there to play with today, for free, and easy. The computer doesn't just boot to it directly, but I don't think that's all that important for the jump start. I think even getting the first print statement to actually work took a bit more effort for me that it would take today to google "how to program" or something to get to some sort of shell or interpreter prompt.

People are actively funnelled into being only consumers since decades ago.

Or maybe it's the same today as ever. There is no more Heathkit but there are certainly many modern equivelents. Maybe it was only a small percentage of people then who would build a Heathkit then, and a similar percentage today who trawl aliexpress for maker toys.

Maybe one difference is I think there is a lot more use of copyright and warranty or even insurance & liability to prevent people from tinkering. It's been a progressive process getting more common over time and the norm has changed over time. Now, every random thing in your life is presented to you as being a thing you may only use in limited procribed ways. Not only that things no longer come with tool kits and schematics, they are even suing people for growing plants from seeds from food you bought in the store. You may eat the vegetable, not put it into some dirt!

Even if your computer today does have access to a world of programming tools, you have just been trained never to be curious about the possibility in the first place, so it never even occurs to you to even look. Not everyone even has that much curiosity to begin with, and those that do are starved and stunted so it never develops.

And of course if all you have is a phone then forget it.

That is, this is certainly close. But still a far cry from the environments we used to have.

I remember typing in screensaver style programs from magazines. Closest I know today would be Wireframe magazine and how it uses pygame zero. Which is awesome, but I don't know a computer that boots to that.

There's no boot-to-BASIC, but learn-to-code options include Scratch, Roblox, Minecraft, Swift Playgrounds, etc., with countless hours of YouTube videos they can watch to learn more, and resources like coding camps (one of my kids really liked Code Ninjas) that didn't exist when I was a kid. It's very different and sophisticated in comparison to what I had access to, but it's not exactly a wasteland.