I can't decide how much I buy this argument. I was born in 1980, and started programming Logo and BASIC very young (around 5 and 7 years old respectively). Almo

I can't decide how much I buy this argument. I was born in 1980, and started programming Logo and BASIC very young (around 5 and 7 years old respectively). Almost everything this post describes is familiar to me: typing in code from books, learning PEEK and POKE, etc. I just don't think much of that matters: whether you learn BASIC on a stupid terminal that can't do much else, or in a super simulated terminal in a web browser seems kind of irrelevant. OTOH, the experience of learning C and having to actually write video and network drivers (or their barest elements) because there wasn't a web you could download a library from...yeah, that probably actually did make me a better programmer. Having had the experience of writing a little bit of actual assembler, even just the old "MOV AX 10; INT 13" (am I remembering that right?) does give me a sense of connecting with the machine more deeply than someone who grew up with the internet. On the first hand again though...living through the late 90s and most of the 2000s was crap. The time of Java. And the worst kind of JavaScript. I pretty much stopped coding altogether until the web had matured as a platform a bit, by the early 2010s.