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It took a while, but you have QB64.

The entire summary is about how using a computer has gotten much easier, widening the gap between users and programmers.

If someone just wants to learn to program, they shouldn't have to learn system administration first.

Yes, they should, if only to know where the hell they're writing their output files.

If someone just wants to learn to program, they shouldn't have to learn operating system concepts first.

Yes, they should, because computers multitask now and a program simply cannot be allowed to stomp all over the operating environment as it could in the DOS days.

For someone who grew up with a Commodore 64, learning to program was hard enough. For someone growing up with a cloud-connected mobile device, it is much harder.

No, it's not. It's that the population of computer users has widened enormously while the population of people that want to program has not widened by the same ratio. It's exactly as hard to learn to program now as it was then -- you can just program vintage hardware or emulations thereof if that's the point. Or you can write in QB64, which is no harder than Qbasic was and in many cases is far easier.

The judge sat me down on the sofa and walked me through his programs on a 2011 court-issued Dell laptop. He couldn’t run the same programs on his desktop computer, he said with some irritation, so the Dell was here to stay. “It’s the last one that will support QuickBASIC, which is kind of a shame, because it’s the only language I really know.”

I wonder if the judge has tried an open source clone of QuickBASIC, such as this one.

It's a bit clunky and rough around the edges, but BASIC is still an option. Knowledge of FORTRAN and Pascal does me absolutely no good whatsoever these days, but I can still keep chugging away in BASIC. QB64 has OpenGL and OpenAL support, and will load and play common audio formats like MP3 and OGG without having to link any libraries. (The pre-compiler takes care of that.) That means even an 8-year-old can make a game that has graphics and sound.

I'm not saying this is the best option. It probably isn't, unless it's the only usable language the teacher knows. But at least it still exists.

And the first step to destroy the gods is to learn BASIC. The next step is to learn how to create and embed your own commands into a BASIC compiler. But tread carefully! The believers in the gods seek out those who would destroy the gods. A man named Steve McNeill, http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde... started down that path and was brought low, and a recent accounting of his tale was scrubbed from the annals of http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...

And the first step to destroy the gods is to learn BASIC. The next step is to learn how to create and embed your own commands into a BASIC compiler. But tread carefully! The believers in the gods seek out those who would destroy the gods. A man named Steve McNeill, http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde... started down that path and was brought low, and a recent accounting of his tale was scrubbed from the annals of http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...

https://archive.org/search.php...
Download the PDFs here, and type the IBM PC listings into QB64. Most of them will work.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...

http://www.qb64.net/ can write programs for Windows, Linux, Mac, and to some extent Android, but that got added last.

If a problem is so simple that cutting and pasting the answer can yield the solution, I doubt it does much to enhance critical thinking skills no matter what.

In fact, lets give them some code right off the bat that requires quite a bit of tweaking to provide the solution to the answer. That way you skip all the stuff that doesn't contribute to critical thinking skills, and they learn what to look for in code libraries so that they aren't constantly reinventing the wheel.

Relevant links:
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...
http://www.qb64sourcecode.com/...

I don't know one developer that isn't paid for their work.

How much software does one have to write to be a "developer"? Is it just writing software, or is there some other criteria that makes a person a developer, in your eyes?

I've written several programs that I haven't expected to get paid for.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde... has plenty of programs none of the writers expect payment for. I could show you more, but that should suffice. Galleon who makes QB64 itself, does not get paid for it.

I doubt you speak to very many people who write software about whether or not they write any programs for free.
Also, you ignore the fact that the people writing software to break DRM usually do it for free, though I'm not sure about what your definition of developer is, so in your mind they may not be developers.

Indie devs are different as they put up the work up front hoping to get paid later (identical model to self employment).

No, that's never how I worked freelance. We agree on the payment up front. Sure, the agreed upon money is paid upon services rendered, but there are restaurants that work on the same principal, agree to the price first and then pay at the end of the meal.

I think's that's a valid way of functioning.

You seem to think that it is the only valid way of functioning, but on contemplation I don't think it is a valid way of functioning, because it says that copyright is not your problem when wearing a customer hat. I also don't think the value you place in ensuring obeying the law is not a valid way of thinking.
http://www.academia.edu/115138... is a relevant read, though it interferes with copy and paste. In it, he argues that people always have the right to disobey the law on two accounts. First obedience of the law does not follow as a necessity from the reasons we might choose to obey it and second the law infringes on our autonomy in making moral judgments.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entr... says some philosophers now deny that law is entitled to all the authority it claims for itself, even when the legal system is legitimate and reasonably just.
I'm afraid the Wikipedia article on mercy does not explain how you connect mercy with paying someone a minimum wage for what they do. The article on an honor system is more illuminative on your way of thinking, but this line:
A person engaged in an honor system has a strong negative concept of breaking or going against it. The negatives may include community shame, loss of status, loss of a personal sense of integrity and pride or in extreme situations, banishment from one's community.
would seem to indicate that we are not on an honor system.
I did not say that mercy always has better outcomes than other things, just that it sometimes does and is always unfair. which is sufficient to prove your assertion, not playing fair = worst experience down the road false. I also said fairness is a broken concept, which you chose to ignore, but is more to the heart of the problem, which is that any decision making based on the concept of fairness is invalid.

I totally agree that copyrights are a huge issue

Except when you are a customer apparently.

If you don't agree with the companies practices you can avoid their products.

I'm trying to understand what makes something a company's product in your mind. If a company chooses to sell something after it has entered the public domain, is it still their product? A lot of food products completely wrapped get thrown in the dumpster. Is it still their product and therefore stealing to go dumpster diving? What about

Sample Programs: http://www.qb64.net/forum/inde...
Another place with programs: http://www.thejoyfulprogrammer...

10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then

is relevant to the discussion and thanks to QB64 it still is, except since you didn't use a quote mark and THEN is a keyword it will give a THEN without IF error, some form of which most BASIC implementations will give.

CLICK HERE!
FTFY

A link to goatse would have been more appropriate.

Then there are the languages like VB.NET which came from VB which came from QB, which came from GW-BASIC but QB is compatible with GW-BASIC but the first two are incompatible with each other as well as with the latter two, but QB64 which can do a lot of what VB.net can do out of the box, is pretty well backwards compatible with QB and GW-BASIC and getting more robust.

CLICK HERE!
FTFY

We wouldn't need things like Jurassic World if we had decent tools that helped us overcome whatever handicaps we have in making decent content ourselves. However there is plenty of free work out there legally already that I personally don't need Jurassic World.
http://www.qb64.net/forum/
http://sourceforge.net/directo...
http://freebasic.net/forum/

If he feels the need to make retro feeling console aps using a purposefully "simplified" language like BASIC, he should try QB64.

http://www.qb64.net/

Runs native on win8, doesn't need dosbox.

Bear in mind that it does not live in realmode dos land though, so don't go expecting to poke at the vga palette register and get away with it and other such gouche antics. (Though he might be able to poke memory from system processes instead, leading to hilarity.)

If he wants to do that, he needs to stick with dosbox+gwbasic, or dosbox+qbasic instead.

But, for simple basic class memory lane stuff, it should work fine, and be VM free.

A teenager I'm acquainted with has been geeking-out with http://www.qb64.net/ for several years. It seems to fill the niche that C-64 BASIC did for me and MS-BASIC and QBasic did for slightly younger geeks.

The reason you still see FDD controllers, serial ports, parallel ports, etc., on modern PC motherboards (even many laptops have the hardware although they don't have the external port itself) is that these things are all integrated into the chipsets these days. The extra bits of hardware to support this stuff on the motherboard costs pennies so there's literally no reason not to include it.

As far as QBASIC, there's a community project to revive it called qb64. Duelling snakes, here I come!