For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a. Basic. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program with it, even in a rudimentary way.

Those days are gone -- Microsoft stopped including Basic with its operating system after Windows 95, a corporate spokesperson confirms. Consequently, today's desktop computers have no built-in general-purpose programming language to entice the curious.

Free starter languages Alice. This was developed at Carnegie Mellon University and is touted as a 3D programming and multimedia environment whose drag-and-drop coding interface does not let students make programming mistakes. Quite Basic. This browser-based Basic emulator was written in JavaScript by Microsoft developer Nikko Strom in response to David Brin's Salon.com article "Why Johnny Can't Code." Visual Basic 2010 Express. While the price of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2010 Professional starts at $549, individual components (such as Visual Basic) can be downloaded for free, although the user is expected to register the software. The stand-alone Visual Basic lacks the integration, testing and debugging facilities of the Visual Studio version. Small Basic. This introductory version of Basic, with only 14 keywords, was a spare-time project by Microsoft employees and is not supported as an official Microsoft product. You can download programming lessons that appear to be carefully thought out, and Small Basic code can be ported to Visual Basic. Python. The big question is whether to use the older Version 2.7 , for which there is a lot of support, or the latest version, 3.2, with its added features. One source for learning Python is Trypython.org (32-bit mode only) and another is Google's Python Class. Racket. Based on a predecessor called Scheme, Racket originated at Rice University and has error messages intended to be helpful for students. The development environment is called DrRacket. Ruby. You can download open-source Ruby versions for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and some Unix distributions. A source for learning Ruby is TryRuby.org. Scratch. Java-based Scratch was developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab with various sources of support. It's touted as allowing children to interactively combine, and assign behavior to, various sources of digital media while learning computational concepts. Standard ML (SML). This is also identified as a common teaching language, and there are a number of dialects circulating. It derives from ML (Meta-Language), which was developed in Scotland in the 1970s.

True, Windows 7 includes PowerShell, a scripting language, and Mac OS X comes equipped with AppleScript and command-line access to Unix (on which OS X is based). But there's no one lingua franca across the entire community of personal computer users to serve as a default starter language (although you can still acquire a few forms of Basic, some of which are listed in the sidebar "Free Starter Languages," at right).

Some mourn Basic's passing, others are pleased that it is gone, and still others are nominating replacements.

Why Basic mattered

Chief among the mourners has been tech pundit and science fiction author David Brin, who decried Basic's passing in a widely cited article, "Why Johnny Can't Code," which appeared on Salon.com in September 2006.

"I have never received as much hate mail as I got for that article, not even for my infamous attacks on Star Wars," Brin recalled recently. "It was almost entirely from people who missed the point, with all the rage directed at Basic. Let me be clear that I am not defending Basic. It was a primitive line-coding program, but everyone had it. Textbooks had exercises written in Basic, and teachers could count on a large fraction of their students being able to perform those assignments."

"I am not defending Basic," says writer David Brin, who talked about the death of the programming language in a 2006 Salon.com article. "It was a primitive line-coding program, but everyone had it."

Today, the top one-tenth of one percent of students "will go to summer camp and learn programming, but the rest may never know that the dots comprising their screens are positioned by logic, math and human-written code," Brin complains.

Brin claims he has had three separate opportunities to ask different Microsoft executives about the passing of Basic. "I described how my son's math textbooks contained exercises in Basic, but we could not do the problems until we bought an old Commodore 64 online. The response of all three was nearly identical: 'There are still Basic programs in textbooks? Well, don't worry, they'll go away.'"

When asked about the issue for this article, a Microsoft spokesperson cited the continued availability of Visual Basic 2010 Express. Offered as a free download, Visual Basic 2010 Express is the only version of Basic that the company now ships. At one point, Microsoft had been pushing the Kid's Programming Language, but the status of that project is unclear.