For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as effortless sounding as the Hour of Code (offered by Code.org) and as obviously ambitious as Code Year ...

Surely BASIC is properly obsolete by now, right? Perhaps not. In addition to inspiring a large part of home computing today, BASIC is still very much alive today, even outside of retro computing.

The programming language, developed five decades ago, didn't require code to be entered on punch cards. It also allowed computer novices to begin programming without a lot of academic training. NPR's ...