Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

I have a Commodore 64 and due to its age it's a rather temperamental piece of equipment, and the 1541 disk drive even more so. I'm planning to replace all of the electrolytic capacitors in it which should help a lot, but that's probably beyond the abilities of most people.

Setting up a Pi or something to boot directly to a C64 emulator would be easier and an order of magnitude less expensive for most people.

I would suggest checking out the Micro:bit:

https://www.microbit.org/

Not exactly the same as what you're looking for, but the idea here is to introduce kids to programming with a small, self-contained environment, and there is both a graphical coding environment and you can move to Python or Javascript.

Ya this appeared on HN previously http://www.nicolasbize.com/blog/30-years-later-qbasic-is-sti...

Hear me out here; Apple's Swift Playgrounds on an iPad.

I'm involved in an extracurricular thing in Scotland focused on giving kids an environment they can figure out computers. We've seen a lot of different approaches to the problem of "how can we get kids to code", and Swift Playgrounds is consistently where we see youngfolk making the most progress.

It gives you a nice, guided framework to get the very basics of programming, and slowly gives you more and more "rope" to play with, ultimately leading you to move your projects to Xcode on a Mac.

Swift may not be your favourite language, and Apple are totally doing this with a view to people becoming iOS/MacOS developers (not necessarily a bad thing), but Swift Playgrounds is definitely best-in-class when it comes to having kids teach themselves how to program. The integration with real-life robots and drones is really impressive, too; the kids absolutely love being able to write real code that makes a real robot do things, it's exceptionally motivational.

What's the point? "Power on to BASIC" is running an app on an old small OS. What's wrong with running any programming environment app fullscreen on a modern computer?