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Yeah, when I learned to program, you needed to know a few things: - How to output text to the screen (and maybe to a file or serial port) - How to read input

Yeah, when I learned to program, you needed to know a few things: - How to output text to the screen (and maybe to a file or serial port) - How to read input from a keyboard (and maybe from a file or serial port) - How to do basic conditionals, looping, and function calls (if, while, for, gosub/jump/return, etc.) And that was about all you needed to make a computer do anything that a store-bought professional program could do. Languages, even BASIC, made those things pretty simple. But also learning the OS interrupts and doing them directly in ASM wasn't that hard. Now you first have to learn 75 layers of abstraction and API stuff just to properly instantiate windows, take focus, etc., nevermind the language and actual domain logic. You can do a whole lot more, and do complex things a lot more simply, once you learn all that. But you can't just do the simple things simply. It's no longer an option. So of course there's no learning path that takes that option anymore. And since people can't learn to do simple things simply, they never get that same feeling or learn deeper. It's just a black box that sometimes/usually lets you do things. But you don't have control over it.

kcexn 4y ago
There's also the problem of what is 'simple' has changed over time. 50 years ago, simple was printing something to console. Nowadays, simple is drawing a graphic in a window. If you give a child or teenager a terminal, and show them how to print some text to console. They will not feel the magic. In fact, in my experience, they often miss the significance altogether and immediately ask me how they can turn that skill into building an app or creating a game. So learning to write software has to be reduced to small academic problems first. Like when you start learning maths, you start with arithmetic and move your way up, and eventually you find applications for it.

kcexn 4y ago

There's also the problem of what is 'simple' has changed over time. 50 years ago, simple was printing something to console. Nowadays, simple is drawing a graphic in a window. If you give a child or teenager a terminal, and show them how to print some text to console. They will not feel the magic. In fact, in my experience, they often miss the significance altogether and immediately ask me how they can turn that skill into building an app or creating a game. So learning to write software has to be reduced to small academic problems first. Like when you start learning maths, you start with arithmetic and move your way up, and eventually you find applications for it.