4 ms·

maybe it's vision more than anything. you've got a thing you want to make, but you get stuck along the way. it's too slow, or doesn't fit in memory, so you hav

by 8note 9y ago

maybe it's vision more than anything. you've got a thing you want to make, but you get stuck along the way. it's too slow, or doesn't fit in memory, so you have to figure out how to optimize what you've got before you can keep building.

jacobolus 9y ago
I think it depends on getting access to enough mentor guidance and/or stumbling over the right initial materials and tools (simple enough compiler/interpreter, some books/magazines, ...). In the WWW era this is in some ways getting easier than it used to be. Kids don’t necessarily know where to look, and it’s easy to get very stuck or discouraged if the learning curve is too steep to get something simple working within a reasonable amount of time.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  I learned electronics before computers (my father was an electronics engineer at the time) and I was more or less taught Turing (intuitively) on a hardware level. So the idea that anything is possible and their is no such thing as magic when it comes to computers (modern ones included) made me keep trying because I knew it had to be possible on the gate level so it was just a matter of trying. When I still had an Msx, my friends where getting Amigas with much better capabilities. I knew that, basically, my computer could do the same: by that time I was well aware of math and algorithms, so I was able to code up ‘real 3d’ but it was so slow that my poor system had to stand there all night to calculate a rotating cube and put it into screen 5 buffers. Now that is all silly stuff, however, it did make me remember my whole carreer that there is no magic. Something which some people who learn high level only, do not seem to have. They actually seem to believe that the provided abstraction (by libraries or language) is the limit to working the machine.

4 ms·

maybe it's vision more than anything. you've got a thing you want to make, but you get stuck along the way. it's too slow, or doesn't fit in memory, so you hav

by 8note 9y ago

jacobolus 9y ago
I think it depends on getting access to enough mentor guidance and/or stumbling over the right initial materials and tools (simple enough compiler/interpreter, some books/magazines, ...). In the WWW era this is in some ways getting easier than it used to be. Kids don’t necessarily know where to look, and it’s easy to get very stuck or discouraged if the learning curve is too steep to get something simple working within a reasonable amount of time.
- tluyben2 9y ago
  I learned electronics before computers (my father was an electronics engineer at the time) and I was more or less taught Turing (intuitively) on a hardware level. So the idea that anything is possible and their is no such thing as magic when it comes to computers (modern ones included) made me keep trying because I knew it had to be possible on the gate level so it was just a matter of trying. When I still had an Msx, my friends where getting Amigas with much better capabilities. I knew that, basically, my computer could do the same: by that time I was well aware of math and algorithms, so I was able to code up ‘real 3d’ but it was so slow that my poor system had to stand there all night to calculate a rotating cube and put it into screen 5 buffers. Now that is all silly stuff, however, it did make me remember my whole carreer that there is no magic. Something which some people who learn high level only, do not seem to have. They actually seem to believe that the provided abstraction (by libraries or language) is the limit to working the machine.