And moreover, I don't think the article's point is true today. Python and JavaScript are both mature languages with massive libraries of online example code for anything you could want to learn about. You can get access to a JavaScript console with a single keypress in any desktop browser- F12.
Teaching kids to understand how to program has benefits, not just for the ones that go on to specialize in computing- I think about a journalist being able to use R or PyPlot to map out crimes in their city based on publicly available police reports, or a lawyer using a script to call the Shopify API to collect their client's records to respond to a discovery request, rather than taking screenshots of the web pages.
Exposure to BASIC doesn't help these people as much as more modern languages would.
For all the endless fancy abstractions we have, the core truth of what must happen becomes lost and so people become slaves to the abstraction instead of masters of the truth.
I bet there is no data backing the Author's claim except - "The way I learned to doesn't exist so noone is learning anymore." I will refer everyone to go look at the numbers - whether it's CS grads per capita or SWEs per capita we are rising quickly.
Damn, yeah, my control over my own computer feels endlessly more limited each "cycle"
