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> Teach children to draw on a canvas in javascript.

I've thought a few times that this is the modern equivalent of the immediate feedback "plot via BASIC".

It's even better, given the fact that JS is a decent language and the results are more easily shareable with your friends.

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Are there decent tools to debug and check JS for you, so that you don't have to rely on the browser built-in support (which is incredibly forgiving but also doesn't tell you what is going on)?

A massive advantage of BASIC was that it would tell you it was wrong as soon as you typed something with a syntax error in it, and it put a big flashing "?" (or similar) right there until you fixed it. Can JS be made to do that?

There's JSLint, you can surely build it in.

And it would have syntax colouring which basic lagged in.

Editor+syntax highlighting for static analysis, and firefox+firebug for runtime errors?

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