I seem to remember Microsoft removing qbasic from normal machines at some point in the 90s, either way it wasn't much use after windows 95 came out.
Visual Basic was essential in th e90s if you wanted to create a gui app, but it was a £500 piece of software you had to buy and install on top of windows.
Now sure, if you installed a standard linux desktop in the 90s you'd have things like gcc, perl etc built in, but you do today.
Nowadays you don't need a compiler for a lot of things, your interpreter is your browser which everyone has, you can just start up your text editor and create a html/js/css page, just like you could on your BBC Micro or Dos 5 machine and start creating a program by copying things out of a magazine. The standard debugging built into firefox and chromium is amazing compared to what you had with QBasic or the Spectrum 48k.
You've also got a realm of information on the internet available on how to start. If you do want to download something like Atom or VSCode it's three clicks away (literally you type "vscode" into ddg, click the first link, then click the deb)
If you want to program something even simpler from entirely in your browser you can pop over to Scratch or Purple Mash and build a game from the browser.
Visual Basic was essential in th e90s if you wanted to create a gui app, but it was a £500 piece of software you had to buy and install on top of windows.
Now sure, if you installed a standard linux desktop in the 90s you'd have things like gcc, perl etc built in, but you do today.
Nowadays you don't need a compiler for a lot of things, your interpreter is your browser which everyone has, you can just start up your text editor and create a html/js/css page, just like you could on your BBC Micro or Dos 5 machine and start creating a program by copying things out of a magazine. The standard debugging built into firefox and chromium is amazing compared to what you had with QBasic or the Spectrum 48k.
You've also got a realm of information on the internet available on how to start. If you do want to download something like Atom or VSCode it's three clicks away (literally you type "vscode" into ddg, click the first link, then click the deb)
If you want to program something even simpler from entirely in your browser you can pop over to Scratch or Purple Mash and build a game from the browser.