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> He doesn't want to CODE. He wants to make a game. Like every kid. [emphasis mine] Well, I as a child (say: 6-8 old) was really rather thinking deeply how a s

> He doesn't want to CODE. He wants to make a game. Like every kid. [emphasis mine] Well, I as a child (say: 6-8 old) was really rather thinking deeply how a suitable way (what programmers would call "data structures" and "programming abstractions", "design of a programming languages" - but of course on a child's level) might look like so that the computer can "understand" and precisely execute my game ideas; my games as executable files would rather be the central side product of this. I also (I am really not lying or boasting!) was thinking as a child (just to be clear: this was my child's imagination; from my present knowledge I know of no suitable way to make this actually work) how if the abstractions are there, one could easily "combine" existing games to make new games - perhaps even partly automatically by a computer: Imagine this: using some photo editor, you can use the magic wand or lasso tool to select some part of a photo, and copy-paste this part into another photo. Why isn't it possible, if you, say, wrote both a space shooter game and an economic simulation game to select and copy-paste some part of the latter into a former to turn the space shooter into a space shooter that also contains economic simulation aspects? The "best actually existing" (really bad) approximation of this that I have seen in life is how the GURPS tabletop role-playing game system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS) enables (in principle) to "copy-paste" elements from one role-playing setting into a whole different "incompatible" one (but it is not that you would want to do this for your typical role-playing session :-) ). Yes, this is how a 6 to 8 years old child (the former me) thinks about game development. :-)

kingkongjaffa 3y ago
Yeah I was about 9 or 10 and an techy relative was trying to teach me binary while I was playing command and conquer red alert on a windows 98 machine. And I was thinking how does code translate into something like red alert. I didn't have anyone to guide me to fill in the dots at the point though and it was just before internet was common everywhere and before google was a household name in England at least to me.
icoder 3y ago
When I was ~9 (maybe 8, maybe 10) I picked the GW-Basic book from shelf (my dad had that for some reason) and started reading. I was fist thick and mostly a summation of commands, so it did not made a whole lot of sense, but hey, I had a day off from school (or was on sick leave) and had already finished the (much thinner) MS-DOS book. And I just loved computers. Luckily when my dad came home he explained that we actually had GW-Basic on the computer (an IBM XT my dad had bought second hand from a friend's dad who was IN computers). That's where it all started. My dad could keep up for a bit but soon I had to rely on whatever the local library offered, and later a floppy disk that somehow made its way to me (copy by copy) full of useful TXT files and examples. Oh internet where were you. So I feel a bit reserved towards the 'YOUR SON DOES NOT WANT TO LEARN TO CODE' screams that seem only based on very, very little context. But I do agree with the general advise, best to not jump to conclusions and go by their (the kids) pace.
- chrismorgan 3y ago
  > I picked the GW-Basic book from shelf (my dad had that for some reason) and started reading. My Dad was a software developer. But for various reasons, he never initiated and practically never taught us anything about software development: but made sure that books were available, so that if it interested us, we could figure it out ourselves. Well, I and my two elder brothers were each copying things from that BASIC book by the age of six or seven, and making up our own stuff within a couple of years, and we all ended up software developers. (None of my other siblings were at all interested.) Most children around these ages probably don’t want to learn to code. But, as my dad puts it, there are some that, when they see what is possible, find the notion of making computers do what they want irresistible. We three all definitely wanted to learn to code.

kingkongjaffa 3y ago

Yeah I was about 9 or 10 and an techy relative was trying to teach me binary while I was playing command and conquer red alert on a windows 98 machine. And I was thinking how does code translate into something like red alert. I didn't have anyone to guide me to fill in the dots at the point though and it was just before internet was common everywhere and before google was a household name in England at least to me.

icoder 3y ago

When I was ~9 (maybe 8, maybe 10) I picked the GW-Basic book from shelf (my dad had that for some reason) and started reading. I was fist thick and mostly a summation of commands, so it did not made a whole lot of sense, but hey, I had a day off from school (or was on sick leave) and had already finished the (much thinner) MS-DOS book. And I just loved computers. Luckily when my dad came home he explained that we actually had GW-Basic on the computer (an IBM XT my dad had bought second hand from a friend's dad who was IN computers). That's where it all started. My dad could keep up for a bit but soon I had to rely on whatever the local library offered, and later a floppy disk that somehow made its way to me (copy by copy) full of useful TXT files and examples. Oh internet where were you. So I feel a bit reserved towards the 'YOUR SON DOES NOT WANT TO LEARN TO CODE' screams that seem only based on very, very little context. But I do agree with the general advise, best to not jump to conclusions and go by their (the kids) pace.

chrismorgan 3y ago
> I picked the GW-Basic book from shelf (my dad had that for some reason) and started reading. My Dad was a software developer. But for various reasons, he never initiated and practically never taught us anything about software development: but made sure that books were available, so that if it interested us, we could figure it out ourselves. Well, I and my two elder brothers were each copying things from that BASIC book by the age of six or seven, and making up our own stuff within a couple of years, and we all ended up software developers. (None of my other siblings were at all interested.) Most children around these ages probably don’t want to learn to code. But, as my dad puts it, there are some that, when they see what is possible, find the notion of making computers do what they want irresistible. We three all definitely wanted to learn to code.