>“I see JavaScript as the modern equivalent of BASIC. ...because of its simplicity, it is a great language for learning fundamental programming concepts.”
That's why Danny Boyle did such a good job. If the British media had been in charge of the ceremony in could have very easily been a cringeworthy ordeal featuring a cast of z-list celebrities dancing about. The inclusion of Tim Berners-Lee and the NHS section were excellent ideas.
a) Is "respect" really so important to you that you are willing to sacrifice a 25 year career? Surely if the pay is good and you enjoy that's all that matters.
b) By switching professions to a more "respected/cool" one do you not think you're just contributing to the problem of programmers not being taken seriously?
Don't look to Minecraft for an example of well written code, there are open source alternatives (Minetest in C++ springs to mind) that run rings around it. And Notch himself is well known for his inefficient magic-number and circular-reference ridden Java code. Although I can't attest to Jeb (who is now the lead dev)'s coding skill.
CS courses tend to explain what bit shifting is but not when you would use it.
For example you'll often see a lecturer drawing lots of 1s and 0s on a whiteboard to illustrate it but you're less likely to see a simple example Java program which uses shifting to get RGB values deconstructed.
They're not doing that, making a genuine clone and undercutting the competition is 100% okay (unless you're one of those pesky PIPA-supporting types)
What these guys are doing is generally making a 20minute game such as pong and including a gallery of, say, Minecraft screenshots in the app. They then market the app in such a way that's designed to trick users into thinking they're purchasing Minecraft, when they're actually just purchasing a gallery of Minecraft screenshots.
They pulled "Temple Jump" because it received too much negative press coverage. However, "Eclipsecraft" and all the other scam games by "Top Best Adult Entertainment" are still available...
More due to their attitudes towards source code and supporting a new generation of developers (Notch pays lipservice to open source and claims to be an avid supporter of the Pirate Party and an opponent of IP law yet aggressively pursues any competition that resembles Minecraft in any way with legal threats)
In terms of actual code they're not even in the same league so I won't bother comparing anything Carmack's achieved with Notch's magic number and circular reference-ridden Java code.
So what's wrong with BASIC? It still exists...