I discovered programming ... before anyone I knew had access to the internet, or even knew what the internet was. Let me be blunt: Our kids are smarter than we

I discovered programming ... before anyone I knew had access to the internet, or even knew what the internet was. Let me be blunt: Our kids are smarter than we are. Or than we were, anyway. They're growing up with Google. The reason BASIC had to be so simple is that Stack Overflow didn't exist. You had to be able to grasp the language on your own, with minimal help, because at best help was miles away, or on the other end of a one-to-one telephone connection, or -- at the very best -- on a one- or two- or maybe even eight line BBS connection. Now I venture to say that by reading the walkthroughs on Slicehost a ten-year-old could get an entire LAMP stack configured and start serving web pages with far less intellectual effort than I spent in writing a "guess this number between 1 and 100" program on the Commodore PET. There are individual videogames that are harder than BASIC was, to say nothing of the collectible card games or the RPGs. The network is a big deal. It changes everything. In another generation it will take intense intellectual and creative effort to imagine just how geeks lived when I was ten, just as I'm still not sure I grasp how (e.g.) the atomic bomb was invented without the benefit of any electronic computer whatsoever, even a pocket calculator. (I have, at best, an abstract and intellectual grasp of what slide rules were about. I don't know how to use one.)