C# Express, Game Studio, and XNA Framework are free for personal and commercial use on Windows. Deploying to your Xbox 360 costs $99/year which includes the rights to sell your games on Xbox Live.
The download includes a simple Platformer game "starter kit" (written by yours truly) which is perfect for game development newbies with just a tiny bit of programming experience. There are loads more samples at http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/catalog/
I don't write the policies, nor may I speak in an official capacity about them. One of our MVPs addresses it as best as an outsider can in an FAQ here: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/12661.aspx
He also describes how students can get one year free through the DreamSpark program: https://www.dreamspark.com/
I'd love the ability to deploy my little learning-iPhone-SDK apps to my iPhone (to get the 'oh wow' feeling that I built something) but that's going to require $99 and getting a provisioning certificate from Apple. And in fact, I may pay the $99, just to be able to do this (not necessarily to sell apps).
I believe that Apple and MSFT did this licensing fee program to stop any sort of homebrew movement (e.g. people sharing games outside of the approved ecosystem). They came from Homebrew but that's in the Cambrian age for them.
With Android, there are no barriers at all to setting up the SDK, creating an application, and installing the application on your own phone via USB. You can even go so far as to build and distribute the .apk packages to let anyone in the world install your application on their own Android phone. In fact, if you don't care about the Market at all, you can simply release, distribute, or even sell your application on your own to customers, and they have the ability to get your app onto their phone as easily as downloading it through their Android Browser.
The only barrier comes when you want to start putting your apps on the Android Market, at which point you must become a registered Android Developer, for the cost of a whopping $25, which then allows you the ability to publish apps to the Market.
I think that's _why's point: the language needs to be bundled, so that programming feels to the newbie like a natural extension of exploring their system. Otherwise, not many will take the leap. It's like the difference between free and $.01.
I actually had my younger brother try this out, and it did what it set out to do very well - that is, it's very sandboxed, but at the same time gives you access to change certain things such as your desktop background, etc.
Pretty well done, at least in my opinion. The one problem is that there's really nowhere to go after that - if you stay with MS tech, it's far too large of a leap to build anything larger than what you can already accomplish with Small Basic.
Definitely. Aside from that I'm not a big fan of BASIC as a starting language any more, the syntax is weird and inconsistent etc etc. Although I really like Python I think Löve (Lua) might be the best place to start now.
MS Small Basic http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx