I think today you get that kind of interactive computing with something like the IPython notebook. You can load an image, apply an effect on it and immediately see the result. You can lookup documentation interactively too.
If anything, I think nowadays there are too much cool things, and the challenge is figuring out what can be achieved with them in a small number of steps, instead of getting lost.
Yes, Python seems to be the closest thing to BASIC and the abundance of cool things is really distracting indeed. Thanks for pointing me to iPython, I haven't heard about it before.
You should check out a modern Smalltalk environment like Pharo so as to find this interactivity taken to its ultimate conclusion (relative to what we have).
> If anything, I think nowadays there are too much cool things, and the challenge is figuring out what can be achieved with them in a small number of steps, instead of getting lost.
And which are actually important to know vs. which will fade in less than a year.
Cool things are rarely important to know, even if they stay cool for a long time. The important thing when starting programming is to have fun. You don't need to keep the knowledge. When I was learning programming in BASIC on C64 I knew that's not the language people write real programs in, but it was still fun and it thought me to think analytically and gave me some technical basics.
If anything, I think nowadays there are too much cool things, and the challenge is figuring out what can be achieved with them in a small number of steps, instead of getting lost.