I played with C64 Basic for a few years, until eventually I got the courage to download Visual Studio Express and learn a bit of C++ when I was 13, and hop over to Linux full time and use Emacs + GCC when I was 14/15, largely because the heavy reliance on the command line for Linux reminded me a bit of C64 basic.
Occasionally I miss how integrated coding was with the operating system in the past. I think overall de-emphasizing coding is a good thing since I feel like the computer is useful enough to justify non-nerds having access to it, but there was something so cool about how accessible it was to, for example, make a game on the C64.
If I want to make a game now, I basically have two options: A) Start from "scratch" and learn OpenGL/DirectX/Vulkan/SDL and basically learn a masters-degree-level of information about graphics engineering, or B) Download something third-party like Unity or GameMaker [1] and work from there. I'm not going to say it's "worse" now, but it's definitely a steeper learning curve than just hoping into Basic and playing around with `poke`.
[1] To be clear, both of those things are pretty cool, not knocking them.
And the competition DR-DOS/PC-DOS lacked them (PC-DOS had the early versions though).
I also made a similar Borland progression, although Turbo C 2.0 only took a couple of months and was quickly replaced by Turbo C++ 1.0 on the same year.
After Turbo Pascal 6, dealing with C was a downgrade.
I didn't really know how to use DOS on my parents' Windows computer, and so as far as I knew at the time, the only way to do programming there was to install a bunch of compilers and that scared me.
Simpler times!