You can do tons in javascript these days also.
I think if someone could provide a browser-based all-in-one solution with language+IDE+hosting+tutorials, then that would fulfill most of his criteria. You could type a few lines, instantly view the page and then send a link to your friends (who can view it at any time).
Macs also now ship with PHP and Ruby, though they are sometimes broken.
What you don't think there are enough ridiculously bad programmers using PHP/javascript already?
Barriers to entry are good. It sorts the people who really want to do it because they love it, from the rest.
The issue is, there is pretty much no barrier at all to programming at the moment. That's why there are so many bad programmers who have just heard there's money to be made. Add to that the fact that identifying bad programmers is sometimes hard, and you have a bad situation.
Raise that barrier for entry, and perhaps someone who thinks "Wow there's money to be made in programming, I better get a job in it", will fall at the first hurdle.
If you're interested in it enough, there's plenty of easy to start development environments around for any beginner.
How many of the other folks here started out just as described in this article: namely, writing silly little BASIC programs for early Commodore, Apple, or DOS systems?
There are a handful of projects aimed at just this niche (Scratch and Greenfoot, for example) but none of them come standard on any new system. That lack of immediate availability means that kids have to actively seek out the tools + have the ability/privileges to install new software before they can even start experimenting with something like this:
10 PRINT "JENNY HAS COOTIES!"
20 GOTO 10I bought my son a ZX Spectrum. You can still buy all the fantastic home computers on ebay etc etc.
Or, there are web based spectrum etc emulators out there where you can just write code and run it.
I'd agree though, it'd be nice to make sure kids can get access to the dev environment that lets them play quickly and easily.
It'd be cool to have something better on netbooks, like the eee. I don't know if there are any good learning programming tools included, but there definitely should be.
$ python
>>> while True:
>>> print "JENNY HAS COOTIES!"
As far as open source is concerned, bad programmers don't bother me, because you can generally find a solution written by someone that is good.
Or just eliminate the fee in its entirety and take a slice of the revenue (or marginally larger slice).
I don't see how lowering cost of entry could be anything but advantageous to console makers.
On the second: Maybe, but that might be seen as a barrier to publishing a game made for fun that just happened to be good. "Eh, I'll just give it away, I was only doing it for fun anyway."