It was a mistake to quit shipping computers and operating systems without even one hobbyist-oriented programming environment preinstalled & featured.

Even a dialect of BASIC, picking up where 8-bit ROM BASICs, GW-BASIC, and QBASIC left off, & much more discoverable & tinker-able than the WSH/VBScript buried deep in every version of Windows since 98, would've been an improvement.

At least then, explorers & would-be hobbyists would have options instantly more viable than the slop machine plague.