Programming

50 years after BASIC and nothing is written in BASIC.

To replicate its success from the 80s we would need a language that is simple enough for everyone to learn but actually performant and powerful enough to write an entire operating system and application stack in. Then perhaps non-programmers would feel more inclined to look under the hood, see how things work, and change their program's behavior.

The problem though, is that for any reasonably complex system or application, you need to use structured programming. This is what enabled the levels of abstraction that we use to break down programs into layers that can be understood in pieces, and it is what makes large complex software possible without ending up with a mess of spaghetti.

However it is these abstractions that turn a software's code into a Domain Specific Language, and endless APIs that need to be learnt and understood by the programmer.

For programmers it is normal to us that when we want to work on a new codebase we have to learn the idiosyncrasies of the codebase, and learn its DSL and the APIs that it uses, or exposes. But for a non-programmer, this would essentially feel like learning everything about programming from scratch. They would have to become a programmer and develop maintainer skills just to understand what they want to change. (This is why programmer is still a job).

Perhaps the real value of BASIC was that without structured programming, every program was just a pile of spaghetti that even a child could pull apart with a fork.