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

Somewhat affluent kids maybe. As a preteen in the 90s I had an uncle's hand-me-down 80s console (NES) with like two cartridges and 80s computer with a few pieces of shareware game demos that I hand to know CLI commands and manage files to start plus a basic interpreter. My (nearly infinite seeming now) time was spent staring at the wall, sitting in rural nature, building things out of my whopping ~80 off-brand lego bricks, socializing with kids that I didn't understand at all (rednecks who didn't comprehend the idea that one might read on purpose, for fun) or messing with the interpreter.

Later on as a teen I'd hear about a "free" OS that was good at running on limited hardware, which would be exciting to me in the very free-as-in gratis sort of way as a kid with an aging (different than previous paragraph, mid 90s) hand-me-down PC, no money or anyone to ask for money -- I had to go on a waiting list to get a CD mailed to me IIRC -- but then then I was up and running with my first linux server (RedHat 6), albeit isolated from the internet at large, but I'd get a whole slew of new interpreters and compilers to mess with (C, Python, Perl, PHP), and they all came with documentation, and stuff had sources I could read!!

During both periods my single mother would sporadically (when a sales guy convinced her) subscribe to cable for a few months at a time before realizing she couldn't afford it. We didn't own many VHS (to a detriment, renting favorites multiple times -- math and planning weren't in my mother's toolbox). Even if there were any real content available for our television, we just had the one and she used it for the entirety of her own downtime. There were internet trial floppies/CDs or ad-supported dial-up schemes etc., but I didn't have regular access to a reliable internet connection in my family home until I got my first job out of high school (writing C for embedded controller of a machine tool platform) and could pay for that with my own money.

If my mother were born 20 years later and made the same kind of life decisions, that rural backwoods is now served by a community project that provides affordable 100 megabit fiber to the premises we could probably keep on despite a late payment here or there (better service and value than the cable I have access to in a real metro area today, frustratingly). I would have hand-me-down iPad and iPhone (as would my mother -- giving us each our own screens with which to consume entertainment in parallel), little money with which to purchase software for these, no way to pirate software for them, no general purpose computer, and my mother could probably manage to keep her Netflix subscription paid for keeping us both with a tap of easy entertainment. My more curious forms of bored energy would probably be satisfied watching other people play PC games on Twitch or something or bulshitting with my peers (who would exist, me being less nerdy and society in general having become a bit more nerdy). By 18 I'd know a lot more about internet culture and games (and probably have more friends) but I wouldn't be able to raise my hand when the careers counselor comes by asking if any of the students knows C (and that machine would probably have a proprietary runtime instead, and that company would probably have offshored those tasks before reaching out to the local high school).

Yes, the Raspberry Pi supports this (via the smaller non-GUI “Raspbian lite” SD image), with Bash, Python, and JavaScript. No GUI or browser or internet connection required. Plug in TV and keyboard and fire up an editor.

(You will want to change the keyboard layout from uk to us first, but after that it is smooth sailing.)

For daily use, you or your child may have to log in as pi/raspberry first, it does not boot directly to a REPL, as there is an OS. But immediately after typing a username and password you are in a bash REPL that is fully programmable.

If you then type ‘node’ or ‘python’ you get the same thing.

TBH I would have preferred a bash shell with readline and an editor to appleII BASIC when growing up.

I can't find any info on recommended ages for Pico-8? What age range do you think it works for?

Bonus points: leave the pi/raspberry login there for when they get old enough to google about VTs and figure out how to exit the matrix.

I agree with you. At a fundamental level, I suppose the same code in JavaScript would be a simple for loop and a console.log() statement that could be run from the command line using Node.js. It isn't quite as easy, but it teaches better programming practices and isn't that much harder. The DOM is definitely another story though.

Another problem I think JavaScript poses for beginners is the community itself. It seems like nobody is interested in perfecting existing libraries but are rather focused on reinventing their own wheels. For example, just for handling projects we have Grunt, Gulp, Brunch, WebPack, Parcel, etc. This kind of instability and fragmentation within a community creates a problem for new developers, because they don't know which direction to go.

I volunteer to teach women and children to write code. I've found that solid communities that embrace and continuously improve a small set of productive libraries and frameworks, such as Elixir, Phoenix, and Mix, make it much easier for beginners to learn and be productive. I do teach JavaScript as well, but I've reduced my focus to just the core language because too many students were overwhelmed by all the libraries and frameworks that solve the exact same problems and complained about that during the courses.