For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program ...

For three years — ever since my son Ben was in fifth grade — he and I have engaged in a quixotic but determined quest: We’ve searched for a simple and straightforward way to get the introductory ...

Knowing how to program a computer is good for you, and it’s a shame more people don’t learn to do it. For years now, that’s been a hugely popular stance. It’s led to educational initiatives as ...

People who got their first taste of IT during the microcomputer boom in the 1970s and 1980s almost certainly started by writing programs in Basic — or, at least, they debugged programs typed in from ...