The stand-alone Visual Basic lacks the integration, testing and debugging facilities of the Visual Studio version. 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. This browser-based Basic emulator was written in JavaScript by Microsoft developer Nikko Strom in response to David Brin's article ' Why Johnny Can't Code.' 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.
Consequently, today's desktop computers have no built-in general-purpose programming language to entice the curious. Those days are gone - Microsoft stopped including Basic with its operating system after Windows 95, a corporate spokesperson confirms. Essentially every PC had it, and just about anyone could learn to program with it, even in a rudimentary way. For years, the lingua franca for desktop computers was the Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a.k.a.
