The BASIC programming language turned 50 on Thursday.

This Time article is a great read — and notes the importance of the language on getting school students programming.

What’s the equivalent today? The Raspberry Pi is helping make hardware affordable. Some might dabble in Visual Basic or C# via Visual Studio Express, or the many of the other freely available languages such as Python, PHP, Javascript… or here’s another way of looking at it, from Jeff Atwood:

You might think today's BASIC is JavaScript. You would be wrong, it is Minecraft.

— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) May 2, 2014