MS Small Basic http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx
C# Express, Game Studio, and XNA Framework are free for personal and commercial use on Windows. Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live.
The download includes a simple Platformer game "starter kit" (written by yours truly) which is perfect for game development newbies with just a tiny bit of programming experience. There are loads more samples at http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/catalog/
What if I don't want to sell anything? Do I still need to pay in order to write programs for a console that I own?
He also describes how students can get one year free through the DreamSpark program: https://www.dreamspark.com/
I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.
The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.
I think that's _why's point: the language needs to be bundled, so that programming feels to the newbie like a natural extension of exploring their system. Otherwise, not many will take the leap. It's like the difference between free and $.01.
Pretty well done, at least in my opinion. The one problem is that there's really nowhere to go after that - if you stay with MS tech, it's far too large of a leap to build anything larger than what you can already accomplish with Small Basic.
Just my two cents. shrug
It's at least a little bit surprising that platform developers don't put more of an effort into making coding for their platforms more accessible. One might assume that Microsoft would have a lot to gain from a generation of young programmers learning to develop for Windows.