Modern programming languages and IDE's are so complex it's enough to put a lot of people off ever learning to program - it seems such a massive learning curve. There's something to be said for learning Basic then assembly on an 8-bit computer, where everything is so much sampler and direct. Writing a value to memory and seeing a blotch of pixels change on the screen gives such a direct understanding of what's going on inside the machine. And if you only have 48k of memory, you can genuinely understand everything the computer is doing.