6 ms·

A ton of people in industry don’t know what this period of time was like because they missed it or didn’t have access to computers at the time. This was the sho

A ton of people in industry don’t know what this period of time was like because they missed it or didn’t have access to computers at the time. This was the short period in history where the following two things were simultaneously true: 1. It was normal and expected to program a computer, if you had one. 2. Computers were inexpensive enough that many families could reasonably own one at home. If you go too far back in time, computers were either expensive or made from kits, which meant that very few people had them. If you look at more recent periods in history, it was no longer normal & expected to program computers. During this period, your computer came with a manual that explained how to write BASIC, and you could get these Usborne books from the public library. Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. There are all these wonderful tools like Scratch. It’s just that the normal way to use computers these days is to use premade software. There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists.

mattbee 4y ago
There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. This just isn't true, there are a billion ways into programming that there weren't in the 80s and 90s, and computers are cheaper too. Sure you don't get to tinker with your OS as casually but the scope of "learner" programming environments is so much greater. Even a keyboard isn't a necessity - look at the results from Dreams on the PS4. And Scratch is ubiquitous in (UK) schools, my son picked it up without any prompt from me. It might just feel like kids don't want to learn programming because most people don't want to learn, but most people (you know) are now using computers compared to the 90s. So proportionally that is fewer computer users becoming programmers, even if numbers are going up!
- zozbot234 4y ago
  The point is that these computers don't come with development tools installed by default and made available in the default environment. They don't provide any equivalent to the BASIC interpreters of old, or to the REPL of a Lisp Machine workstation. You can install e.g. Linux distributions that do provide the means to code and rebuild nearly any part of the installed system, but these are very much the exception not the rule. > And Scratch is ubiquitous in (UK) schools, my son picked it up without any prompt from me. Scratch is a huge downgrade from the likes of LOGO (a real LISP implementation, with a few syntactic conveniences to help novices) and even BASIC on the BBC Micro, which used to be taught in UK schools.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    >The point is that these computers don't come with development tools installed by default and made available in the default environment. I mean, Linux aside that's technically true. But, you got a BASIC interpreter that was pretty barebones even for the mid-80s in a PC of that era. And Turbo Pascal was a revelation when it came out because other "real" programming tools cost hundreds of dollars. But, today, for free, you can install any number of advanced programming languages and IDEs in about 10 minutes. (And, on a Mac, Python at least comes pre-installed.)
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      On modern machines those are a hard to find afterthought from the POV of most users. Even if you know what you're doing, getting started with installing dev tools from the command line is non-trivial. With an 8-bit micro, BASIC was the point and it Just Worked. These systems were toys sold with a toy language, but it was a toy language that had enough depth to teach useful fundamentals. More, there was an ecosystem of other toy users and support sources and motivators - books, magazines, game entrepreneurs, TV shows, even just the novelty factor of having an actual computer at home - that made the 8-bit era in the UK a cultural scene. There's no exactly equivalent cultural scene today. You need a fair level of experience to get started with modern languages, and there are no mainstream cultural drivers pushing you to do it. (There are niche drivers but they're only effective after you find them.) You do get some motivators with entry-level HTML and web design, but they're immediately aimed at careers and professional development. What's missing today is the combination of a toy environment which is fairly simple but can still be used for non-trivial projects, a mainstream non-niche non-professional cultural scene, and a sense of fun, play, and exploration which provides the curious with motivation. The closest approximations are toy environments like Minecraft. They're doing a reasonable job and there's a scene of sorts around them, but it's not quite on the same scale as the 80s systems.
  - jll29 4y ago
    I had an interesting debate with a respected colleague at a British university about this once. My view was that teaching kids should be in a way that is "real", e.g. typing in Python code and not "toy" (e.g. Scratch) so that - they can get a feel for how real-life programmers work; - they can incrementally refine and build on what they know until they have picked up a very valuable (in terms of job market) skill I agree Scratch is sufficient to understand loops etc. but it doesn't "scale", i.e. at some point you need to switch over from Scratch to an "grown-up" language.
- klodolph 4y ago
  >> There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. > This just isn't true, [...] Let me get this straight... you're saying that children are generally aware that they can learn to program, and that children who aren't aware of these opportunities are rare or something? I must be misunderstanding something here, because that sounds like complete horseshit to me. I have years of experience teaching children how to program, and the vast majority show up unaware that learning to program is something within their reach.
IMSAI8080 4y ago
I agree. The fact the 80s micros booted to BASIC put programming in front of you from the get go and subsequent machines hid programming away. The fact the machine came with a manual that was mostly about programming, they expected you to do that. If you wanted to play a game you often typed it in from a book (like the Usborne series). You tried to see if you could cheat or change the game by messing with the numbers which exposed you to tinkering with programming.
ghaff 4y ago
>Computers were inexpensive enough that many families could reasonably own one at home. Sort of. There were cheap computers like the Commodore 64. But, by the time you put together a floppy disk only PC clone in mid-80s, you were probably still looking at a few thousand dollars so maybe $6K in today's money. Not astronomical but still a pretty big purchase. Hard drives were just coming into the reach of consumers then but that would have added to the price.
- mrob 4y ago
  A 48K ZX Spectrum (the most popular model) sold for 129GBP in June 1983. According to the first Google result I get for "uk rpi inflation calculator"[0], that's equivalent to 523GBP today. It was typically used with a television as the display, which most families would already have. The usual data storage system was cassette tapes, which were also widespread at the time, although it was common for people to buy cheap dedicated tape recorders for their microcomputers. Not as cheap as the options we have now, but most people who really wanted one could have found a way to afford it. [0] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Right. That's why I mentioned the Commodore 64 which was probably roughly similar in capabilities and price. Doing programming on such a system was pretty different from a PC-compatible however. But it was absolutely a way for kids to get started.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Cassette tapes were an awful storage medium though. They were just about usable enough for loading software from previously written tapes, and even that was slow. Floppy disk media was a total game changer, allowing for some amount of actual productive work even on the old 8-bit machines.
    - shever73 4y ago
      They weren’t ideal, but I owe my career to writing games for the ZX Spectrum and distributing them on cassette. It wasn’t until 1988 that I was able to get an Amstrad PC1512 with floppy drives.
briHass 4y ago
I feel fortunate that, as a child of the early 80s, by the time I started programming (age 8 or so), it was the late 80s and these personal computers were available for cheap at yard sales. One of the first I owned was a VIC20, which I think I bought (or convinced my parents to buy) with all the peripherals at a garage sale for $30. I got a C64 soon after in a similar way. A few years later, my dad would bring home IBM PC XTs and ATs they were throwing out at his work. The rest is, as they say, history. I loved these books, and I'm pretty sure I had almost the complete library. A few of these books, a curious kid, and a simple computer that boots directly into BASIC, with no distractions.
- enneff 4y ago
  Basically describes my experience too. One thing that was amazing about this time is that even a 10yo (as I was) could understand almost everything that was going on in those machines (in a functional way, if not the finer details). Then as we grew up the programming world became more complex, and we were able to track that complexity as it happened. I don’t envy new programmers today who have to contend with vast complexity even to do the simplest of things.
  - davb 4y ago
    I, too, miss the days where it was possible to understand every component, every bit, every abstraction inside a computer. It’s virtually impossible now, not least because there are so many microcontrollers and microprocessors running proprietary firmware in any given PC or smartphone. I’ve thought about this a lot recently, and understand that a lot of this complexity comes from the security landscape today (we run far more programs concurrently, and don’t want them spying on each other while we use our computers for sensitive operations like banking and communications); I wonder if we’re on the cusp of a solution to the complexity of learning to code with modern sandboxing/containerisation - rather than target the underlying hardware or even the host OS, the 99% will target a common, inherently secure sandboxed VM of sorts (with first class support on the host OS, sort of what Sun hoped to achieve with Java’s “write once, run everywhere” idea). Sure, there would always be software that would have to run on the underlying platform but I theorise that 99% of software could target the sandbox. The pieces are all there - containerisation, immutable operating systems, etc. I would happily trade all the complexity I have to deal with daily, if there was a common, cross platform, secure, open and well integrated sandboxing solution.
Zenst 4y ago
Indeed the documentation was a level that service engineers today would envy and more so techincal details at a level you only get from some serious reverse engineering/hacking today. Kinda best way to put it is documentation was akin to what you would expect from a mature MCU today as comparable level and in some ways, more accesable and you felt you owned the computer more and had a more intermate understanding. Though many things go that way, Cars another example and cars of that era, you could get documentation and fix yourself. Today, you under your hood might as well be a Borg cube.
keithnz 4y ago
not sure about "expected". Quite a few of my friends and myself got computers in this era, vic20s, c64s, Spectrums, Ataris mostly. Most of my friends just loaded games. I learnt to program mine ( I had a few of these books! ), another friend spent a little bit of time learning basic also, but pirating quickly became a thing and soon everyone had a ton of games.
userbinator 4y ago
Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. There are all these wonderful tools like Scratch. It might be easier to learn, but it's harder than ever to actually do something useful with those "toy" environments. Back then, the "mainstream" computer magazines were full of source code listings, often even in Asm, for utilities that did various useful things. They created binaries in the <1k size range, with a lot of them being below 100 bytes. There was a continuum from "computer illiterate" to "master developer", with "average user" and "power user" sitting somewhere between. Now you have to fight your way through layers of "security" to even start to do something useful, and on some platforms, it's nearly impossible. IMHO corporate interests are to blame for this gradual closing-off, because they don't want users to discover that some things they profit from are in fact extremely easy to do. There's been a bunch of articles here and elsewhere about the "war on general-purpose computing" which really started being noticeable in the late 2000s/early 2010s.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  > because they don't want users to discover that some things they profit from are in fact extremely easy to do I have to laugh at these conspiracy theories. The real reason is the operating systems no longer come with a BASIC prompt. This is true for Windows, OSX, and that corporate Linux product. If every operating system, including phones, came with an icon that opened to a BASIC prompt, I bet you'd see an explosion of programming competence especially among young people.
  - ChadNauseam 4y ago
    On windows and macos you can write “python” in the terminal and get a python prompt with no extra steps. (well, on windows you get a windows store pop-up to install python, but same diff.) I’ve never used BASIC, but is it really so much more approachable/productive than python? With python’s batteries included philosophy, I’d expect it to be pretty quick for beginners. The only sticking point I can think of is GUIs
    - WalterBright 4y ago
rodgerd 4y ago
> Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. In some ways, I disagree. In the early-mid 80s, you didn't have a chorus of people on social media abusing you for your choice of programming language, as is the norm now for anyone who dares to pick up PHP (for example). You didn't have to battle with absurdly over-complex development environments, deployment options, and every man and his dog shouting at you on social media about why you're wrong from chosing framework x instead of framework y, or telling you that you're a sub-moron for thinking that it would be nice to have a running program rather than spend time battling emacs to be a "real programmer". The world was much more insular and there were fewer choices and it was actually a lot better for it. On top of that, the distance from what I could put together with the built-in BASIC on a Spectrum or BBC and a lot of the programs that you could buy wasn't that vast. You didn't need a studio of artists and designers and musicians to come up with a game that approximates what you'd get on a cassette. You could come up with something interesting on your own.
analog31 4y ago
>>>> Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. I think it's easier in some ways, harder in others. I learned to program in 1981, while in high school. "Ease" involves not only access, but also motivation. At the time, programming seemed a lot more casual and exploratory. Because displays were so primitive, you could easily write a simple BASIC program that looked just like commercial software. That was really gratifying, and gave you a feeling of power. There were useful programs with no graphics. And programming was still kind of a counterculture. There were maybe 3 or 4 kids at my high school who were interested in it, and we were all nerds. Today, everybody has been exposed to really slick graphical software or games before they're ever introduced to programming. Making something that looks like software is a daunting task. I don't even do it any more. There is also vastly more adult interference and attention -- programming is a desirable, lucrative career after all -- meaning pressure to do it "the right way" for the sake of your "career."
- klodolph 4y ago
  People learn to make music, even though it takes years to make music at a level comparable to the music you hear.
  - analog31 4y ago
    Good point, and I'm one of those people. It doesn't have to be easy, to be motivating. But nobody told me that music would be a good career. ;-)
  - thristian 4y ago
    It takes decades to learn how to make a song that millions of people will listen to on the radio. It takes decades to write an app that millions of people use every day to do their jobs. You can teach somebody to play the first few bars of Stairway to Heaven (or at least something that sounds recognisably like it) in an afternoon. On an Apple II, you can write a BASIC program that looks like Ultima IV or VisiCalc in maybe a week. But it would take years of study, let alone effort, to make something that looked recognisably like Elden Ring or Excel.
steve_taylor 4y ago
There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. Oh they're aware, alright. It's hard to get them interested in coding when they can play Minecraft or zone out in front of YouTube. Whatever they do on the device other than coding is going to be far more entertaining than coding and a lot easier. Source: I have kids.
- 867-5309 4y ago
  Scratch is aimed at kids and is the best introduction to programming for kids and parents of all ages and abilities Minecraft has all levels of in-game programming from simple recipes to redstone circuits. outside the game there're procedural quests, time-based events, animated skins.. "look Daddy I spent 4 hours building this castle" - "that's great, let's find out how to make thousands of them in seconds!" YouTube is full of programming tutorials for kids. there is a lot of crap to trim but the time is well invested there is a balance between work and play, but often the benefits of coding bleed into the gameplay to a point where the two are happily married the trick is finding a balance - halve screentime into educational and recreational, they still get 100% gaming/YouTube, just on a reward basis in general, teachers at school cannot code and kids will need to be able to code in the future. it's not the teachers' fault, they weren't taught to code yet they have to teach coding. the next generations of teachers will not have this problem since they will be kids from now onwards who can code. introducing coding as a regular activity at home will benefit kids for life
- bluedino 4y ago
  I zoned out in front of BBS's, AOL, and then the entire Internet, as well as played plenty of TIE Fighter, Doom, and Age of Empires but I still managed to be interested in coding. Those C64's and Apple ]['s came with a ton of games as well.

mattbee 4y ago

There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. This just isn't true, there are a billion ways into programming that there weren't in the 80s and 90s, and computers are cheaper too. Sure you don't get to tinker with your OS as casually but the scope of "learner" programming environments is so much greater. Even a keyboard isn't a necessity - look at the results from Dreams on the PS4. And Scratch is ubiquitous in (UK) schools, my son picked it up without any prompt from me. It might just feel like kids don't want to learn programming because most people don't want to learn, but most people (you know) are now using computers compared to the 90s. So proportionally that is fewer computer users becoming programmers, even if numbers are going up!

zozbot234 4y ago
The point is that these computers don't come with development tools installed by default and made available in the default environment. They don't provide any equivalent to the BASIC interpreters of old, or to the REPL of a Lisp Machine workstation. You can install e.g. Linux distributions that do provide the means to code and rebuild nearly any part of the installed system, but these are very much the exception not the rule. > And Scratch is ubiquitous in (UK) schools, my son picked it up without any prompt from me. Scratch is a huge downgrade from the likes of LOGO (a real LISP implementation, with a few syntactic conveniences to help novices) and even BASIC on the BBC Micro, which used to be taught in UK schools.
- ghaff 4y ago
  >The point is that these computers don't come with development tools installed by default and made available in the default environment. I mean, Linux aside that's technically true. But, you got a BASIC interpreter that was pretty barebones even for the mid-80s in a PC of that era. And Turbo Pascal was a revelation when it came out because other "real" programming tools cost hundreds of dollars. But, today, for free, you can install any number of advanced programming languages and IDEs in about 10 minutes. (And, on a Mac, Python at least comes pre-installed.)
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    On modern machines those are a hard to find afterthought from the POV of most users. Even if you know what you're doing, getting started with installing dev tools from the command line is non-trivial. With an 8-bit micro, BASIC was the point and it Just Worked. These systems were toys sold with a toy language, but it was a toy language that had enough depth to teach useful fundamentals. More, there was an ecosystem of other toy users and support sources and motivators - books, magazines, game entrepreneurs, TV shows, even just the novelty factor of having an actual computer at home - that made the 8-bit era in the UK a cultural scene. There's no exactly equivalent cultural scene today. You need a fair level of experience to get started with modern languages, and there are no mainstream cultural drivers pushing you to do it. (There are niche drivers but they're only effective after you find them.) You do get some motivators with entry-level HTML and web design, but they're immediately aimed at careers and professional development. What's missing today is the combination of a toy environment which is fairly simple but can still be used for non-trivial projects, a mainstream non-niche non-professional cultural scene, and a sense of fun, play, and exploration which provides the curious with motivation. The closest approximations are toy environments like Minecraft. They're doing a reasonable job and there's a scene of sorts around them, but it's not quite on the same scale as the 80s systems.
- jll29 4y ago
  I had an interesting debate with a respected colleague at a British university about this once. My view was that teaching kids should be in a way that is "real", e.g. typing in Python code and not "toy" (e.g. Scratch) so that - they can get a feel for how real-life programmers work; - they can incrementally refine and build on what they know until they have picked up a very valuable (in terms of job market) skill I agree Scratch is sufficient to understand loops etc. but it doesn't "scale", i.e. at some point you need to switch over from Scratch to an "grown-up" language.
klodolph 4y ago
>> There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. > This just isn't true, [...] Let me get this straight... you're saying that children are generally aware that they can learn to program, and that children who aren't aware of these opportunities are rare or something? I must be misunderstanding something here, because that sounds like complete horseshit to me. I have years of experience teaching children how to program, and the vast majority show up unaware that learning to program is something within their reach.

IMSAI8080 4y ago

I agree. The fact the 80s micros booted to BASIC put programming in front of you from the get go and subsequent machines hid programming away. The fact the machine came with a manual that was mostly about programming, they expected you to do that. If you wanted to play a game you often typed it in from a book (like the Usborne series). You tried to see if you could cheat or change the game by messing with the numbers which exposed you to tinkering with programming.

ghaff 4y ago

>Computers were inexpensive enough that many families could reasonably own one at home. Sort of. There were cheap computers like the Commodore 64. But, by the time you put together a floppy disk only PC clone in mid-80s, you were probably still looking at a few thousand dollars so maybe $6K in today's money. Not astronomical but still a pretty big purchase. Hard drives were just coming into the reach of consumers then but that would have added to the price.

mrob 4y ago
A 48K ZX Spectrum (the most popular model) sold for 129GBP in June 1983. According to the first Google result I get for "uk rpi inflation calculator"[0], that's equivalent to 523GBP today. It was typically used with a television as the display, which most families would already have. The usual data storage system was cassette tapes, which were also widespread at the time, although it was common for people to buy cheap dedicated tape recorders for their microcomputers. Not as cheap as the options we have now, but most people who really wanted one could have found a way to afford it. [0] https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator https://www.hl.co.uk/tools/calculators/inflation-calculator
- ghaff 4y ago
  Right. That's why I mentioned the Commodore 64 which was probably roughly similar in capabilities and price. Doing programming on such a system was pretty different from a PC-compatible however. But it was absolutely a way for kids to get started.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Cassette tapes were an awful storage medium though. They were just about usable enough for loading software from previously written tapes, and even that was slow. Floppy disk media was a total game changer, allowing for some amount of actual productive work even on the old 8-bit machines.
  - shever73 4y ago
    They weren’t ideal, but I owe my career to writing games for the ZX Spectrum and distributing them on cassette. It wasn’t until 1988 that I was able to get an Amstrad PC1512 with floppy drives.

briHass 4y ago

I feel fortunate that, as a child of the early 80s, by the time I started programming (age 8 or so), it was the late 80s and these personal computers were available for cheap at yard sales. One of the first I owned was a VIC20, which I think I bought (or convinced my parents to buy) with all the peripherals at a garage sale for $30. I got a C64 soon after in a similar way. A few years later, my dad would bring home IBM PC XTs and ATs they were throwing out at his work. The rest is, as they say, history. I loved these books, and I'm pretty sure I had almost the complete library. A few of these books, a curious kid, and a simple computer that boots directly into BASIC, with no distractions.

enneff 4y ago
Basically describes my experience too. One thing that was amazing about this time is that even a 10yo (as I was) could understand almost everything that was going on in those machines (in a functional way, if not the finer details). Then as we grew up the programming world became more complex, and we were able to track that complexity as it happened. I don’t envy new programmers today who have to contend with vast complexity even to do the simplest of things.
- davb 4y ago
  I, too, miss the days where it was possible to understand every component, every bit, every abstraction inside a computer. It’s virtually impossible now, not least because there are so many microcontrollers and microprocessors running proprietary firmware in any given PC or smartphone. I’ve thought about this a lot recently, and understand that a lot of this complexity comes from the security landscape today (we run far more programs concurrently, and don’t want them spying on each other while we use our computers for sensitive operations like banking and communications); I wonder if we’re on the cusp of a solution to the complexity of learning to code with modern sandboxing/containerisation - rather than target the underlying hardware or even the host OS, the 99% will target a common, inherently secure sandboxed VM of sorts (with first class support on the host OS, sort of what Sun hoped to achieve with Java’s “write once, run everywhere” idea). Sure, there would always be software that would have to run on the underlying platform but I theorise that 99% of software could target the sandbox. The pieces are all there - containerisation, immutable operating systems, etc. I would happily trade all the complexity I have to deal with daily, if there was a common, cross platform, secure, open and well integrated sandboxing solution.

Zenst 4y ago

Indeed the documentation was a level that service engineers today would envy and more so techincal details at a level you only get from some serious reverse engineering/hacking today. Kinda best way to put it is documentation was akin to what you would expect from a mature MCU today as comparable level and in some ways, more accesable and you felt you owned the computer more and had a more intermate understanding. Though many things go that way, Cars another example and cars of that era, you could get documentation and fix yourself. Today, you under your hood might as well be a Borg cube.

keithnz 4y ago

not sure about "expected". Quite a few of my friends and myself got computers in this era, vic20s, c64s, Spectrums, Ataris mostly. Most of my friends just loaded games. I learnt to program mine ( I had a few of these books! ), another friend spent a little bit of time learning basic also, but pirating quickly became a thing and soon everyone had a ton of games.

userbinator 4y ago

Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. There are all these wonderful tools like Scratch. It might be easier to learn, but it's harder than ever to actually do something useful with those "toy" environments. Back then, the "mainstream" computer magazines were full of source code listings, often even in Asm, for utilities that did various useful things. They created binaries in the <1k size range, with a lot of them being below 100 bytes. There was a continuum from "computer illiterate" to "master developer", with "average user" and "power user" sitting somewhere between. Now you have to fight your way through layers of "security" to even start to do something useful, and on some platforms, it's nearly impossible. IMHO corporate interests are to blame for this gradual closing-off, because they don't want users to discover that some things they profit from are in fact extremely easy to do. There's been a bunch of articles here and elsewhere about the "war on general-purpose computing" which really started being noticeable in the late 2000s/early 2010s.

WalterBright 4y ago
> because they don't want users to discover that some things they profit from are in fact extremely easy to do I have to laugh at these conspiracy theories. The real reason is the operating systems no longer come with a BASIC prompt. This is true for Windows, OSX, and that corporate Linux product. If every operating system, including phones, came with an icon that opened to a BASIC prompt, I bet you'd see an explosion of programming competence especially among young people.
- ChadNauseam 4y ago
  On windows and macos you can write “python” in the terminal and get a python prompt with no extra steps. (well, on windows you get a windows store pop-up to install python, but same diff.) I’ve never used BASIC, but is it really so much more approachable/productive than python? With python’s batteries included philosophy, I’d expect it to be pretty quick for beginners. The only sticking point I can think of is GUIs
  - WalterBright 4y ago

rodgerd 4y ago

> Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. In some ways, I disagree. In the early-mid 80s, you didn't have a chorus of people on social media abusing you for your choice of programming language, as is the norm now for anyone who dares to pick up PHP (for example). You didn't have to battle with absurdly over-complex development environments, deployment options, and every man and his dog shouting at you on social media about why you're wrong from chosing framework x instead of framework y, or telling you that you're a sub-moron for thinking that it would be nice to have a running program rather than spend time battling emacs to be a "real programmer". The world was much more insular and there were fewer choices and it was actually a lot better for it. On top of that, the distance from what I could put together with the built-in BASIC on a Spectrum or BBC and a lot of the programs that you could buy wasn't that vast. You didn't need a studio of artists and designers and musicians to come up with a game that approximates what you'd get on a cassette. You could come up with something interesting on your own.

analog31 4y ago

>>>> Nowadays, it is easier than ever to learn programming. I think it's easier in some ways, harder in others. I learned to program in 1981, while in high school. "Ease" involves not only access, but also motivation. At the time, programming seemed a lot more casual and exploratory. Because displays were so primitive, you could easily write a simple BASIC program that looked just like commercial software. That was really gratifying, and gave you a feeling of power. There were useful programs with no graphics. And programming was still kind of a counterculture. There were maybe 3 or 4 kids at my high school who were interested in it, and we were all nerds. Today, everybody has been exposed to really slick graphical software or games before they're ever introduced to programming. Making something that looks like software is a daunting task. I don't even do it any more. There is also vastly more adult interference and attention -- programming is a desirable, lucrative career after all -- meaning pressure to do it "the right way" for the sake of your "career."

klodolph 4y ago
People learn to make music, even though it takes years to make music at a level comparable to the music you hear.
- analog31 4y ago
  Good point, and I'm one of those people. It doesn't have to be easy, to be motivating. But nobody told me that music would be a good career. ;-)
- thristian 4y ago
  It takes decades to learn how to make a song that millions of people will listen to on the radio. It takes decades to write an app that millions of people use every day to do their jobs. You can teach somebody to play the first few bars of Stairway to Heaven (or at least something that sounds recognisably like it) in an afternoon. On an Apple II, you can write a BASIC program that looks like Ultima IV or VisiCalc in maybe a week. But it would take years of study, let alone effort, to make something that looked recognisably like Elden Ring or Excel.

steve_taylor 4y ago

There are tons of children who could learn to program, could even teach themselves, but who are unaware that the option exists. Oh they're aware, alright. It's hard to get them interested in coding when they can play Minecraft or zone out in front of YouTube. Whatever they do on the device other than coding is going to be far more entertaining than coding and a lot easier. Source: I have kids.

867-5309 4y ago
Scratch is aimed at kids and is the best introduction to programming for kids and parents of all ages and abilities Minecraft has all levels of in-game programming from simple recipes to redstone circuits. outside the game there're procedural quests, time-based events, animated skins.. "look Daddy I spent 4 hours building this castle" - "that's great, let's find out how to make thousands of them in seconds!" YouTube is full of programming tutorials for kids. there is a lot of crap to trim but the time is well invested there is a balance between work and play, but often the benefits of coding bleed into the gameplay to a point where the two are happily married the trick is finding a balance - halve screentime into educational and recreational, they still get 100% gaming/YouTube, just on a reward basis in general, teachers at school cannot code and kids will need to be able to code in the future. it's not the teachers' fault, they weren't taught to code yet they have to teach coding. the next generations of teachers will not have this problem since they will be kids from now onwards who can code. introducing coding as a regular activity at home will benefit kids for life
bluedino 4y ago
I zoned out in front of BBS's, AOL, and then the entire Internet, as well as played plenty of TIE Fighter, Doom, and Age of Empires but I still managed to be interested in coding. Those C64's and Apple ]['s came with a ton of games as well.