Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC

You can do it with environments provided with most OS's. The big difference is that it is not put in front of people to the same extent that makes it trivially discoverable, and available from the second you press the on switch in the case of most of the 8-bits.

AppleScript is a particular peeve of mine. I was a long time Amiga user. I was used to "everything" being glued together via AREXX ports. OS X have the capability, yet the environment is very different. It is far more rare (presumably not Apple's or developers fault per se - more reflecting a different demographics) to see OS X applications manuals call out script integration as a major feature, or "hang" all its own automation off of it, even for the ones with good script integration (and though I'm a Linux user at home, this is a sore point: Linux script integration is woeful in comparison)

"you could still completely understand what your computer was doing and what the software running on it was"

I can see a potential return to those days for people who want to be really sure that their systems are secure.

Even the IBM PC and XT had BASIC in ROM, which worked much the same way; and it also came with a complete set of schematics and the source code of the BIOS (I don't think the source for ROM BASIC was included, since it was licensed from Microsoft.) While it wasn't truly "open source" in the legal sense and was still copyrighted, it gave users a chance to learn how their machines worked all the way down to the hardware level, and along with that came the feeling that they actually owned the hardware they bought. DOS also came with a version of BASIC and DEBUG, a simple debugger that allowed the creation, editing, and testing of Asm programs. I remember the magazines at the time would have source code listings of simple programs for readers to type in and use. This isn't really "programming" in the sense of "write your own code", but it definitely provided a "catch-point" - some of the more curious might modify the program and see its effects, or do more research about e.g. the instructions and BIOS calls it used, and eventually start writing their own.

Several decades later, you're lucky if you can find even a detailed datasheet or programming manual for the most important chips in a computer. BIOSes are all closed and proprietary, with the exception of minority projects like Coreboot. The relatively few schematics for commercial PCs only exist because someone was nice and neighbourly enough to leak them. I think the gradual shift towards consumer-oriented is part of it, but security also had a chilling effect: belief in "security through obscurity" and the idea that users shouldn't be developers has lead to a situation in which access to development tools and information are seemingly treated as a privilege instead of a right, and systems are correspondingly locked down against users (but they'll all say this was to prevent "malicious attackers"...)

The walled gardens of Apple's iDevices, Microsoft's position on Secure Boot/Trusted Computing, and increasing prevalence of other schemes like DRM designed to take control away from users and strongly push a consumer-oriented mentality are a great evidence of this effect. More subtly, dumbed-down software designed to be "easy to use" take away much of the incentive to learn about how things work that is often responsible for transforming consumers into producers. No doubt the companies like this because they want to be in control and regulate the creation of software; as me and others have said before, "knowledge is power, and they don't want the users to have too much of it." However, I don't think they're ultimately going to benefit from this practice, since by encouraging users in the direction of consumption, they'll be reducing the number of potential good developers in the future.

From that article you linked to:

A kid puts her hand up in my lesson. ‘My computer won’t switch on,’ she says, with the air of desperation that implies she’s tried every conceivable way of making the thing work. I reach forward and switch on the monitor, and the screen flickers to life, displaying the Windows login screen. She can’t use a computer.

Having done some work helping with teaching before - in a computer science course - the number of times I've seen this happen is astounding. A large number of the population seem to have this condition where it appears their brain completely shuts down the moment they're put in front of a monitor, and I think a large part of it has to do with the notion that computers are somehow "magical" and "mysterious" things that don't follow the same rules of the universe as everything else.

As a ZX Spectrum veteran the only things I really missed - in the sense that they made my bigger programs unwieldy - were precisely those cited in the first paragraph, viz calling subroutines by name rather than line number, and parameter passing. Oh yes and an Else statement. Of course those snooty BBC Micro kids had all that IIRC.

The Spectrum community was fantastic in those days - in addition to a plethora of magazines there was the "ZX Spectrum ROM disassembly" (which I still possess) that gave an annotated listing of the whole 16K ROM; basic interpreter, fp calculator, cassette tape routines, the lot; an absolute goldmine.

So an entire ecosystem that basically screamed "program me!". A beautiful time.

That's a false equivalence (at least I think that's the right term). Back then, computers were by a huge barrier to entry the exclusive domain to the kind of people who would grow up to read hacker news. Blindly typing in games from magazines without trying to understand them is the 1980's equivalent of "watching shit scroll by for hours makes me a Linux expert overnight". If that gives you an illusion of being able to create programs, it's the same kind of illusion that causes people to post Odesk tasks to build a Facebook clone with Outlook integrated for $200.

Unleashing the power of computing to the general public is an incredible leap forward and arrogantly brushing away the riff raff and their parochial consumption is like dismissing the industrial revolution because who needs cheap cloth when you can get fine lambswool tweed?

Let's not pretend that anyone of us highly skilled programmers could actually build even a small fraction of the tools we turn on and "consume" (even if for the purpose of writing new tools) on a daily basis - if not for lack of skill, although a hugely diverse range of skills did go in to it, then for sheer lack of time.

Yes, we need to demystify programming and teach at least rudimentary skills in school. Taking a few years of a foreign language doesn't make you proficient in the language, and you might never need it, but understanding the abstraction behind the existence of different languages is important and useful in it's own right - in the same way, understanding in the most simplistic ways what makes a computer tic is important for understanding much of the world today.