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When I was quite young, I started 'programming' by copying code out of magazines. I would run home from school, open up a magazine, write code until dinner, run
by hluska 7y ago
When I was quite young, I started 'programming' by copying code out of magazines. I would run home from school, open up a magazine, write code until dinner, run downstairs after and write code until I had to go to bed. If I repeated that often enough, I would eventually (if I was lucky) be able to compile my code, fix the 14,000 missing pieces of punctuation and then have a (very primitive) game to play and share with my friends.
I don't recall learning much, but I was at an age where I was more concerned with getting Nario to jump over a bucket than with actually learning. I likely did learn something, maybe even just a passion for sitting in front of a computer and making it do cool things. I'm sure I also learned that if you really want something, just put in the hours and jfgid. For me though, the operative part was games. I wanted to play games and at some level, I wanted to learn how other people built amazing games for my Tandy.
The point of all that (other than 7:30am nostalgia) is that, for me at least, I had to be motivated. I had to want the end result enough to push through the grueling bullshit of it all. To this day, I believe that the only way to learn to code is to fall in love with a project to such an extent that you can't stop yourself. Whether that's a good lesson for teenagers will have to wait...my kid is only three, so I have a decade of self doubt to interfere. :)
- yoz-y 7y agoI fear that this kind of passion is now harder to achieve, because kids are shown that computers can do amazing stuff from very young age but anything that you can produce yourself will be woefully behind. Back in the day a game copied from a magazine was worse than what one could buy, but not _that_ much worse. This is why, I think, we see people "coding" in Minecraft and Roblox. They have all of the environment set up for them and can do cool stuff which they can immediately appreciate.
- hluska 7y agoThat’s an excellent point that time had kind of glossed over for me. When you mentioned that, I remembered playing a couple of commercial games. You’re right - they were better, but not that much better. Thanks for the comment and helping my memories! This has been a great thread.
- RandomInteger4 7y agoWhile I agree to a certain extent with the point you made in your first paragraph, I'm not sure why you doubt quoted coding with regard to Minecraft and Roblox. Both games have Turing complete languages. Roblox uses Lua. Minecraft uses javascript on Bedrock, but also has a command block scripting language along with redstone, which together form a unique and mentally stimulating coding environment. This isn't even mentioning mods which add different languages (Forth or Lua) or modding the game itself, which isn't that difficult to stumble into these days.
- yoz-y 7y agoOh, I did not know that (I was only familiar with redstone).