And, when you booted into GNU/Linux, you also had a web browser, chat programs, games, etc. The possibilities for distractions are numerous. Contrast that to a BASIC prompt. If you go to your computer to learn BASIC, as long as you are sitting in front of the computer and actively staring at it, you're either going to:
a) get bored as hell by doing nothing
b) type some stuff in from your magazine and execute
(thereby learning "something" along the way because of
typos, pattern recognition, etc. (of course you'll /then/ get
distracted, but you had to work a bit)
c) write a program from scratch by exploration, or need.
Distraction is a human problem, not a technological one.
You can just as easily use a type-writer instead of a computer to write your next novel in order to escape the distractions of twitter, wikipedia, et al. But you'll just find something else if you are prone to being distracted.
I measure "conduciveness" differently. For me it's the distance between what I know now and what I want to know. When I was growing up and typing in programs on an Apple II, the gap was really large. Getting information was hard and came in at a trickle. Access to technology was pretty limited; I had what came with my computer and that was it for a long time. Conversely, modern *nix systems are largely self documented. There's no guess-work at what a particular C function does or how it is implemented; there's a man page for it. I have access to the complete source code of my operating system. If I want to learn anything, it's a few key-strokes away.
Discipline is the cure to distraction. Not blunt tools.
If anyone wants to try something that approximates a computer that boots into a BASIC prompt, try AVR programming or Arduino. It's either C or assembler and you've got to use mainly reference manuals. Arduino has more resources and thus may be more prone to distraction.
Either of these require programming on a computer with web-browser, games, chat, etc. Programming embedded hardware does not solve the problem of working in a distracting environment. Self-discipline, determination, and perhaps other inner qualities are necessary and always have been.
I think that was important for my actually learning to program circa 1978. If I was growing up today, it's very likely I would have been too distracted by all the other cool stuff I could do on the computer. I teach High School programming courses now, and that is something I have to battle.
