https://medium.com/young-coder/learning-to-code-in-a-retro-programming-environment-fb5c5982ca54

Gerald Friedland is Principal Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Like many, he taught himself to program as a child in the 1980s with the ancient — but refreshingly straightforward — Commodore 16.

Here’s where things take an interesting turn. When his daughter, Mona, turned 7, he chose to go back to the source. Instead of today’s code playgrounds and glitzy graphical environments, he decided to introduce her to BASIC and the 8-bit Commodore programming environment — with the help of a free emulator. As he says, “The sensation of causing an action simply by typing a word is priceless.”