I just got home from teaching JavaScript to a room full of people who've never written a line of code in their life. This book is missing something critical that most intros to JavaScript overlook: How does the student set up the plumbing and run their code? It's amazing how much of a hump this is for many trying to get started. It also amazes me how oblivious most of us programmers are to it. "Just open Chrome Dev T…
While not a perfect answer to the issue, I often tend to wonder whether or not we lost something in the transition from traditional microcomputers (Apple IIe, Commodore, TRS-80, etc) to the PC era...?
Actually, even in the early PC era, the PC booted to ROM BASIC; this was how personal microcomputers worked.
That said, in the very early history of personal computing, with machines like the Altair, IMSAI, and Sol - these machines "out of the box" (so to speak) didn't drop immediately into a ROM BASIC or "monitor"; they usually had to be "booted" off of some paper tape or other storage media hosting the boot process (I wasn't around during that period, but I wonder if that was only a part - if you then had to "bootstrap" your way up the stack to get to something useful? I know on the Altair, unless you had it set up in ROM to boot from, you had to hand-toggle some initial boot code in just to read the larger boot process from paper tape). All of this process was virtually identical to how commercial and larger systems were booted.
But the Apple changed this, and made the "personal microcomputer" accessible to the general public. Now, they could power it on, and get to a prompt of some sort. It still didn't do much, but it wasn't as arcane. All you had to do was type some stuff...and...you got something in return: A recipe filing system, a calendar, a poem, a maze, a game of some sort (Hunt the Wumpus!), etc.
This continued to be the case for (about) a couple of decades - the first real crack in this was the introduction of the Macintosh, but most people stuck with the other systems, with the Mac relegated to the desktop publishing realm mostly (at which it really excelled). Things started to really change in the late 1980s and early 90s - mainly because of the introduction of more usable versions of DOS and (later) Windows. Thus, the PC era was born.
People began to stop being creators (of software) and started to become consumers instead. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing - there were still creators of course, but this marked a split; there were now two distinct camps being formed.
With this, though, began the difficulty in teaching programming - if you didn't know how to get to the interpreter or compiler, you would have a difficult time learning.
So here we are today. Fortunately, the answer seems to be coming from the web: There are more than a few sites out there that let you examine, edit, and run code all from your browser, for more languages than you might have thought existed (and new ones are added constantly). It isn't the same as it was (from when I was a kid), but maybe in a way it is better: Help - whether from others or from some other resource, is just a few clicks away (no longer do you have to thumb thru magazines or books trying to formulate an answer)...