What! I've been looking for a nice easy to use turtle program for ages and it's been right in front of me the whole time!

Thank you for this.

The justifications you give for that make it seem like JavaScript is the new BASIC while Python is a better Logo (less ubiquitous language that is structurally better for pedagogy, though disadvantaged simply by being less ubiquitous.)

> Windows is the place where it hurts.

And still the dominant desktop platform. Which would be less important, as mobile eclipses desktop, if mobile environments included a standard, bundled interpreter that users could easily access for tinkering, but that's very much not the case.

You quoted me -- I said Python is a better BASIC; implying that while Javascript might be the new BASIC, Python is better at being one. Let that be clear!

The turtle graphics module is only one example. Python ships with plenty of other useful libraries and tools that make it great for experimenting and learning.

Let's not sell BASIC short -- its success wasn't just about ubiquity. It was designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz to help Dartmouth students write programs to do work. They thought it was a shame more people didn't know how to program computers. I think they succeeded with their original goals[0].

Python has the advantage of being invented some twenty-five-ish-odd years later. After a couple decades of development it has grown into a language and system that far surpasses BASIC in its ability to teach people how to write programs and be productive right away. It's better than BASIC and teaching more people how to program, imho.

Javascript is definitely more ubiquitous. I wish it was easier to use and came with better libraries and things in the browsers. It's everywhere but it's not easier to use than Python. And Python's not as obscure as you'd think... don't discount the market share of Apple + Linux systems combined. If Windows jumps on board and packages a Python distribution: watch out (as if, but hey).

The new BASIC... jury is still out for me. I like both languages just fine. Javascript is a little bit more ubiquitous but it's not any easier to get into in my experience; at least not with modern browsers hiding the web console and providing little in the way of built-in code editors (and to say nothing of the DOM getting in the way of everything from drawing graphics to the screen to accessing the keyboard).

[0] http://time.com/69316/basic/

That's kind of a constant in the tech world with every technology; I remember as a kid old timers making that complaint about radios. For a long time, its been made about cars. And, yeah, more recently, personal computers.

With radios it has been that moving for tubes to transistors to ICs has upped the minimum tools needed to get anything done.

With cars emission laws and such had introduced something similar via computerized injection etc.

But with computers etc the complexity was there for the start, but the tinker hostility has, IMO, come from a change in business from selling hardware to the hardware being a terminal for "content". Thus the tinkering hostility comes from propping up DRM under the guise of "security".

my first programming language, approx age 9 on the BBC Micro at school :)

BTW, a team at Intel put Python into GRUB recently. And IMO they produced something that strongly reminded me of firing up something akin to the C64 and be greeted with a basic prompt.

Also, i swear i recently read about someone making a python enabled shell. Meaning that you could mix shell commands and python code on the same input. Had some small issues where python syntax overlapped with command switches or something.