5 ms·

I have a hard time believing an eight year old child was watching Doom 3 developer talks and telling his kindergarden friends about buffer shadows and Carmack's

I have a hard time believing an eight year old child was watching Doom 3 developer talks and telling his kindergarden friends about buffer shadows and Carmack's Reverse.

sorbusherra 2y ago
I don't know...When I was kid we used to talk poking memory addresses for cheats while playing c64 games and we were all 9-11 years old. Kids do darnest things.
- amatecha 2y ago
  true, that reminds me of my friend hex-editing his savegame files for WarCraft 1 in DOS - he would have been 10 or 11 at the time.
deleted 2y ago
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badsectoracula 2y ago
I started programming at 7, i was certainly telling my friends about all the random stuff i barely had a smidge of understanding while trying to program simple games myself - i could barely move a smiley face (DOS ASCII character 2) on screen to collect hearts (DOS ASCII character 3) and yet i was certain i could make a game like Prince of Persia once i figured out how to draw lines on screen with Turbo Pascal's BGI.
jufjfau 2y ago
[flagged]
pjmlp 2y ago
Back in the 80's having 10 year olds show off Z80 Assembly on their Speccy and C64 wasn't that extraordinary, what was impressive is the ideas many would think of without nothing else besides a couple of books and nothing else. I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital). By 14 I was already into Demoscene stuff. EDIT: Naturally it was 6502 on the C64.
- warpspin 2y ago
  Dito. Started c64 scene at 12. You had to not talk about your age back then, though.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  Is there any modern equivalent? If you could control a child's computer access and didn't care about them missing out on tiktok etc what would you do? Of course a refurbed ZX Spectrum is an option, as is Scratch or some other hand-holding environment. I'd be interested to know if anyone is raising tough, rugged, Mel-type hackers[0] these days, and how they're going about it. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
  - warpspin 2y ago
    I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays the way we had it in the 80ies and 90ies (or even earlier, but I'm an 80ies child, haha). At best with some kind of limited hardware or in some narrow area like writing games. Also, surely not with Scratch. Scratch is, what you give a 5 year old to learn some concepts in my opinion. My children were appalled by it when they became 10 cause it's "baby stuff". At least those kids interested in programming. The thing in the 80ies and early 90ies was, that you could actually, as a kid, compete with something professional and have total control over the outcome, if you had a bit of talent in any area. This was unbelievably motivating. Where can one person or two people nowadays seriously compete with professionals and have serious control over the outcome? If at all in the area, where you will actually find kids today: Roblox games, Unity games, anything with a finished engine, where they can focus on the content itself because anything else will simply be unrealistically large effort. Also, limited retro hardware things might work, I do not know. For me, if I was a child again, they would not work because these are things that are too limited - I would always know there are really powerful PCs with all 3d stuff around. As said above, the fantasy of being able to do anything some software company could do was what motivated me in the 80ies/early 90ies, so I'd rather probably teach myself some game engine, too, because that allows me to live the state-of-the-art fantasy. At least I assume that. Another thing old hardware did, by the way, which modern hardware does not, is that it launched people on a programming learning path immediately, if they desired to successfully use it. You could not use a C64 without learning at least a tiny little bit of basic.
bogwog 2y ago
I started when I was around 10, and made my first "game engine" in C++ at around 12 or 13. If anything, doing this type of thing when you're that young is easier (unlimited free time, and young brains probably learn things more easily). The only real barrier is interest/motivation.
- colechristensen 2y ago
  >The only real barrier is interest/motivation. My barrier at that age was just information. Obviously things have become much easier now. Having windows 95 as your first OS made this particularly difficult and the Internet was what it was at that time. It took me years to find the right questions to ask and the right information. What took me several years to figure out I have tought someone in an afternoon. (getting from 0 to a short roadmap to something functional).
  - amatecha 2y ago
    Yeah, I always wished so badly I knew an adult who was a skilled programmer. I borrowed books from the library but I would always hit a wall so early on, not being able to make sense of the concepts (and being on a Mac, which none of the books provided a compiler for). Looking back I know for a fact I could have grasped the concepts if they were explained a little more "gradually" for me, which a mentor-type person absolutely could have done easily.
    - ShroudedNight 2y ago
      Without mentorship / guidance, how are you supposed to know that K&R and / or Petzold (and maybe A. S. Tanenbaum?) are where it's at, and everything else is arguably a waste of your time? Almost every programming book I encountered seemed intent on making the computer appear mysterious and esoteric which did not help me feel empowered to explore.
      - colechristensen 2y ago
        I even got to K&R. Types, variables, input and output made sense to young me. Pointers made sense but I couldn't wrap my head around why, and then I was stuck with "what next". For years everything next I could find (like writing a windows application) was way over my head and any "step 2" was completely elusive.
wrsh07 2y ago
Even today a friend's kid has been programming since younger than eight - watching YouTube videos about game development etc I think you'd be surprised at what kids are able to do at what ages if they're allowed to work productively towards useful goals Watch a video of some Montessori 3 year olds.
- bobim 2y ago
  Montessori has nothing to do with this, my triple experience is that kids figure out the method allows them to derp around, and they will derp around. The school tells nothing as keeping the cash coming in is more important than kids education. A passionate kid is passionate, the method is not making him passionate.
  - wrsh07 2y ago
    The friend's kid isn't a Montessori kid He just likes programming. He likes building stuff. One of his best friends is a kid his age who lives across the country. They just like being productive. At the end of my previous post, I was trying to dispel this idea that kids under ten are incapable of doing things independently. That they're incapable of engaging in things like an adult. If a 3 year old can grocery shop and make a cake, an 8 year old can watch a game dev talk. Can be obsessed with game engines. Can learn to juggle. My niece wrote a blog post years ago when she was under ten, and the comments she got were "your parents must have written this for you, you aren't capable of having done this" which is absurd. Don't act like kids are incapable just because the ones you see are incapable.
    - bobim 2y ago
      I agree, sorry, I just have a grief against scammers jeopardizing kids education.
amatecha 2y ago
hmmm, I don't feel too skeptical about it - I think it just sounds more impressive in hindsight where it can be described in full clarity (and probably underestimating how much was picked up in the months/years afterward). I was writing HyperTalk around the age of 9, after learning the "secret" command of "set userlevel to 5" [0], although it was kinda difficult without any documentation (I just opened other existing Stacks to see how stuff was done). If you grew up around computers and had a knack for it, well, a youthful brain just soaks up everything it's exposed to, really. This actually reminds me of how valuable it can be to expose kids to complex/depthful things from an early age -- some will dive right in and embrace it, and potentially enjoy a rewarding experience with the particular subject.. For me it was computers, and at the time I really couldn't get enough. [0] https://hypercard.center/HyperTalkReference/Set-the-user-level-to-scripting https://hypercard.center/HyperTalkReference/Set-the-user-lev...
pzduniak 2y ago
Eh, you're overestimating OP's statement. I think they're roughly my age and at eight I was busy figuring out Win32 APIs and DLL imports in Object Pascal to make _rad utility programs_. I probably would've immediately gone into game modding if not for the fact that I was using a late 90s Dell notebook that had like 8MB of VRAM :) Two years later I had a bunch of game servers running entire custom gamemodes implemented in LUA with other kids _loving it_.
pdntspa 2y ago
I was pulling similar shit around that age, armed with those old illustrated "How Computers Work" books. This kid just got into something nerdier
foldor 2y ago
8 years old is well past kindergarten aged. It's the second grade around here. It's still young, but the maturity difference is huge.
shpongled 2y ago
I booted a hobby OS I had written in C on the family PC (off of a floppy disk!) by the time I was 13. Kids can have a lot of free time to mess around with this stuff - I would love to see what I could do now with a whole summer off.
craftkiller 2y ago
I started programming when I was 8. Certainly not to the point where I would understand Carmack's reverse and buffer shadows but there are people much smarter than me and information has never been more available than it is today so I don't think its completely implausible.
deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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jheriko 2y ago
i don't. although the magic of carmack's reverse to me is how it was a passing thought for me in a gamedev book written by an over privileged silly valley asshat in my teens... and turned out to be gold.
brcmthrowaway 2y ago
It's called having wealthy parents
deterministic 2y ago
I was programming the ZX-Spectrum in machine code when I was eleven. And discussing what I was doing with other (geeky) kids my age.

I have a hard time believing an eight year old child was watching Doom 3 developer talks and telling his kindergarden friends about buffer shadows and Carmack's Reverse.

sorbusherra 2y ago

I don't know...When I was kid we used to talk poking memory addresses for cheats while playing c64 games and we were all 9-11 years old. Kids do darnest things.

amatecha 2y ago
true, that reminds me of my friend hex-editing his savegame files for WarCraft 1 in DOS - he would have been 10 or 11 at the time.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

badsectoracula 2y ago

I started programming at 7, i was certainly telling my friends about all the random stuff i barely had a smidge of understanding while trying to program simple games myself - i could barely move a smiley face (DOS ASCII character 2) on screen to collect hearts (DOS ASCII character 3) and yet i was certain i could make a game like Prince of Persia once i figured out how to draw lines on screen with Turbo Pascal's BGI.

jufjfau 2y ago

[flagged]

pjmlp 2y ago

Back in the 80's having 10 year olds show off Z80 Assembly on their Speccy and C64 wasn't that extraordinary, what was impressive is the ideas many would think of without nothing else besides a couple of books and nothing else. I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital). By 14 I was already into Demoscene stuff. EDIT: Naturally it was 6502 on the C64.

warpspin 2y ago
Dito. Started c64 scene at 12. You had to not talk about your age back then, though.
Y_Y 2y ago
Is there any modern equivalent? If you could control a child's computer access and didn't care about them missing out on tiktok etc what would you do? Of course a refurbed ZX Spectrum is an option, as is Scratch or some other hand-holding environment. I'd be interested to know if anyone is raising tough, rugged, Mel-type hackers[0] these days, and how they're going about it. [0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
- warpspin 2y ago
  I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays the way we had it in the 80ies and 90ies (or even earlier, but I'm an 80ies child, haha). At best with some kind of limited hardware or in some narrow area like writing games. Also, surely not with Scratch. Scratch is, what you give a 5 year old to learn some concepts in my opinion. My children were appalled by it when they became 10 cause it's "baby stuff". At least those kids interested in programming. The thing in the 80ies and early 90ies was, that you could actually, as a kid, compete with something professional and have total control over the outcome, if you had a bit of talent in any area. This was unbelievably motivating. Where can one person or two people nowadays seriously compete with professionals and have serious control over the outcome? If at all in the area, where you will actually find kids today: Roblox games, Unity games, anything with a finished engine, where they can focus on the content itself because anything else will simply be unrealistically large effort. Also, limited retro hardware things might work, I do not know. For me, if I was a child again, they would not work because these are things that are too limited - I would always know there are really powerful PCs with all 3d stuff around. As said above, the fantasy of being able to do anything some software company could do was what motivated me in the 80ies/early 90ies, so I'd rather probably teach myself some game engine, too, because that allows me to live the state-of-the-art fantasy. At least I assume that. Another thing old hardware did, by the way, which modern hardware does not, is that it launched people on a programming learning path immediately, if they desired to successfully use it. You could not use a C64 without learning at least a tiny little bit of basic.

bogwog 2y ago

I started when I was around 10, and made my first "game engine" in C++ at around 12 or 13. If anything, doing this type of thing when you're that young is easier (unlimited free time, and young brains probably learn things more easily). The only real barrier is interest/motivation.

colechristensen 2y ago
>The only real barrier is interest/motivation. My barrier at that age was just information. Obviously things have become much easier now. Having windows 95 as your first OS made this particularly difficult and the Internet was what it was at that time. It took me years to find the right questions to ask and the right information. What took me several years to figure out I have tought someone in an afternoon. (getting from 0 to a short roadmap to something functional).
- amatecha 2y ago
  Yeah, I always wished so badly I knew an adult who was a skilled programmer. I borrowed books from the library but I would always hit a wall so early on, not being able to make sense of the concepts (and being on a Mac, which none of the books provided a compiler for). Looking back I know for a fact I could have grasped the concepts if they were explained a little more "gradually" for me, which a mentor-type person absolutely could have done easily.
  - ShroudedNight 2y ago
    Without mentorship / guidance, how are you supposed to know that K&R and / or Petzold (and maybe A. S. Tanenbaum?) are where it's at, and everything else is arguably a waste of your time? Almost every programming book I encountered seemed intent on making the computer appear mysterious and esoteric which did not help me feel empowered to explore.
    - colechristensen 2y ago
      I even got to K&R. Types, variables, input and output made sense to young me. Pointers made sense but I couldn't wrap my head around why, and then I was stuck with "what next". For years everything next I could find (like writing a windows application) was way over my head and any "step 2" was completely elusive.

wrsh07 2y ago

Even today a friend's kid has been programming since younger than eight - watching YouTube videos about game development etc I think you'd be surprised at what kids are able to do at what ages if they're allowed to work productively towards useful goals Watch a video of some Montessori 3 year olds.

bobim 2y ago
Montessori has nothing to do with this, my triple experience is that kids figure out the method allows them to derp around, and they will derp around. The school tells nothing as keeping the cash coming in is more important than kids education. A passionate kid is passionate, the method is not making him passionate.
- wrsh07 2y ago
  The friend's kid isn't a Montessori kid He just likes programming. He likes building stuff. One of his best friends is a kid his age who lives across the country. They just like being productive. At the end of my previous post, I was trying to dispel this idea that kids under ten are incapable of doing things independently. That they're incapable of engaging in things like an adult. If a 3 year old can grocery shop and make a cake, an 8 year old can watch a game dev talk. Can be obsessed with game engines. Can learn to juggle. My niece wrote a blog post years ago when she was under ten, and the comments she got were "your parents must have written this for you, you aren't capable of having done this" which is absurd. Don't act like kids are incapable just because the ones you see are incapable.
  - bobim 2y ago
    I agree, sorry, I just have a grief against scammers jeopardizing kids education.

amatecha 2y ago

hmmm, I don't feel too skeptical about it - I think it just sounds more impressive in hindsight where it can be described in full clarity (and probably underestimating how much was picked up in the months/years afterward). I was writing HyperTalk around the age of 9, after learning the "secret" command of "set userlevel to 5" [0], although it was kinda difficult without any documentation (I just opened other existing Stacks to see how stuff was done). If you grew up around computers and had a knack for it, well, a youthful brain just soaks up everything it's exposed to, really. This actually reminds me of how valuable it can be to expose kids to complex/depthful things from an early age -- some will dive right in and embrace it, and potentially enjoy a rewarding experience with the particular subject.. For me it was computers, and at the time I really couldn't get enough. [0] https://hypercard.center/HyperTalkReference/Set-the-user-level-to-scripting https://hypercard.center/HyperTalkReference/Set-the-user-lev...

pzduniak 2y ago

Eh, you're overestimating OP's statement. I think they're roughly my age and at eight I was busy figuring out Win32 APIs and DLL imports in Object Pascal to make _rad utility programs_. I probably would've immediately gone into game modding if not for the fact that I was using a late 90s Dell notebook that had like 8MB of VRAM :) Two years later I had a bunch of game servers running entire custom gamemodes implemented in LUA with other kids _loving it_.

pdntspa 2y ago

I was pulling similar shit around that age, armed with those old illustrated "How Computers Work" books. This kid just got into something nerdier

foldor 2y ago

8 years old is well past kindergarten aged. It's the second grade around here. It's still young, but the maturity difference is huge.

shpongled 2y ago

I booted a hobby OS I had written in C on the family PC (off of a floppy disk!) by the time I was 13. Kids can have a lot of free time to mess around with this stuff - I would love to see what I could do now with a whole summer off.

craftkiller 2y ago

I started programming when I was 8. Certainly not to the point where I would understand Carmack's reverse and buffer shadows but there are people much smarter than me and information has never been more available than it is today so I don't think its completely implausible.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jheriko 2y ago

i don't. although the magic of carmack's reverse to me is how it was a passing thought for me in a gamedev book written by an over privileged silly valley asshat in my teens... and turned out to be gold.

brcmthrowaway 2y ago

It's called having wealthy parents

deterministic 2y ago

I was programming the ZX-Spectrum in machine code when I was eleven. And discussing what I was doing with other (geeky) kids my age.