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My son makes games in Roblox. He just turned 14 and I highly encourage it. As a result he learned how to use an IDE and how to write LUA. Fantastic way to learn

My son makes games in Roblox. He just turned 14 and I highly encourage it. As a result he learned how to use an IDE and how to write LUA. Fantastic way to learn to code. He even downloaded blender and watched youtube tutorials on how to create 3d models.

dylan604 1y ago
I enjoy hearing about how kids are doing things like this. I'm also very jealous of the resources available to them. I started learning 3D modeling when Lightwave came bundled with the Video Toaster. There was no YouTube. The internet wasn't even a thing yet. Resources were very limited to me, to the point that I got frustrated with not being able to get past very rudimentary models but I kept playing. The thing that really killed my interest was the incredibly long render times on that 8MHz CPU. If you told me back then that real time rendering would be possible, I'd have laughed in your face. If I had access to Unreal type 3D then, you wouldn't have been able to pull me away from the computer. So probably a good thing for me it wasn't!
- gyomu 1y ago
  Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges. I became a programmer because I had many, many hours with nothing to do at my grandparents' house. I did have a programmable calculator and the reference programming manual that came with it, so I'd recreate (in extremely basic form) the games I read about in magazines/that my friends told me about and that I dreamt of playing but didn't have access to, such as Diablo/Sim City/etc. Later I learned assembly to make faster games (I'd print out z80 asm reference tutorials at the library, write code by hand on paper, and then type it out, compile it, and load it on my calculator from a library computer a week or so later). Honestly, lots of respect for the kids these days that are so self driven that they'll spend hours on their projects and not watching mindless short form videos. I don't think I'd have had that self discipline if I had had a phone with unlimited internet/YouTube/TikTok/etc access.
  - dylan604 1y ago
    > Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges. I'm jealous of the resources, not of the kids. No way in hell I'd want to go through being a teenager again, especially with social media existing. But that has nothing to do with the learning resources available now that were not when I was their age.
    - ffsm8 1y ago
      Another thing for teenagers growing up in such an environment is that the capability delta keeps expanding. Not only are the job opportunities just starting to dry up, the competition for these openings gets ever fiercer, giving only the most dedicated people a real chance. I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.
      - brailsafe 1y ago
        > I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs. Additionally, because of the scarcity of information and degree of difficulty in learning those skills 15+ years ago, you could actually get paid well enough to have very good access to the housing market wherever you'd want. Now, in some places where work actually exists, if you get a job that you can sustain long term, it might cost 100% of your paycheque to land a mortgage on much more than a tiny apartment. You realistically need to shack up with another software engineer or whatever, not just anyone you fancy which itself seems quite difficult to pin down even well into one's 30s Go to school -> take the debt, grind for potentially years to get a job if you're lucky -> find someone who also has a high paying job -> take on an amount more debt that your grandparents can't even visualize, and are yet responsible for -> kids?
  - nurettin 1y ago
    Same here. All I had was a C= 64, its manual and several magazines which sometimes had printed 6502 assembly bytes. Took me three years to figure out how to poke them to the correct ram address.
constantcrying 1y ago
From what I have seen about Roblox, it is a game which parents should be extremely critical of and if I had children I would absolutely not let them play it. Not only are there repeat allegations of unfairness towards the player, Roblox also contains a stock market so that children can start gambling early. (See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ) Besides that and far more disturbingly there are repeat and ongoing accusations of child abuse and child sexualization, which the company behind Roblox is ignoring. These accusations are bad enough that they have caused short selling of the company stocks.
- lordgrenville 1y ago
  Here is the report by (the late) Hindenburg Research about dangers to kids on Roblox. Can't vouch for the contents, but I think parents should at least skim it and take precautions. https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox

dylan604 1y ago

I enjoy hearing about how kids are doing things like this. I'm also very jealous of the resources available to them. I started learning 3D modeling when Lightwave came bundled with the Video Toaster. There was no YouTube. The internet wasn't even a thing yet. Resources were very limited to me, to the point that I got frustrated with not being able to get past very rudimentary models but I kept playing. The thing that really killed my interest was the incredibly long render times on that 8MHz CPU. If you told me back then that real time rendering would be possible, I'd have laughed in your face. If I had access to Unreal type 3D then, you wouldn't have been able to pull me away from the computer. So probably a good thing for me it wasn't!

gyomu 1y ago
Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges. I became a programmer because I had many, many hours with nothing to do at my grandparents' house. I did have a programmable calculator and the reference programming manual that came with it, so I'd recreate (in extremely basic form) the games I read about in magazines/that my friends told me about and that I dreamt of playing but didn't have access to, such as Diablo/Sim City/etc. Later I learned assembly to make faster games (I'd print out z80 asm reference tutorials at the library, write code by hand on paper, and then type it out, compile it, and load it on my calculator from a library computer a week or so later). Honestly, lots of respect for the kids these days that are so self driven that they'll spend hours on their projects and not watching mindless short form videos. I don't think I'd have had that self discipline if I had had a phone with unlimited internet/YouTube/TikTok/etc access.
- dylan604 1y ago
  > Kids these days have tons of resources, but I don't know if I'm too jealous of them, as it comes with other challenges. I'm jealous of the resources, not of the kids. No way in hell I'd want to go through being a teenager again, especially with social media existing. But that has nothing to do with the learning resources available now that were not when I was their age.
  - ffsm8 1y ago
    Another thing for teenagers growing up in such an environment is that the capability delta keeps expanding. Not only are the job opportunities just starting to dry up, the competition for these openings gets ever fiercer, giving only the most dedicated people a real chance. I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs.
    - brailsafe 1y ago
      > I'm really glad to be almost in my 40s. Going through a junior job market without having parents providing you with thousands of $$$ for the extra opportunities is not going to go well, as most will likely find out in the coming 10-15 yrs. Additionally, because of the scarcity of information and degree of difficulty in learning those skills 15+ years ago, you could actually get paid well enough to have very good access to the housing market wherever you'd want. Now, in some places where work actually exists, if you get a job that you can sustain long term, it might cost 100% of your paycheque to land a mortgage on much more than a tiny apartment. You realistically need to shack up with another software engineer or whatever, not just anyone you fancy which itself seems quite difficult to pin down even well into one's 30s Go to school -> take the debt, grind for potentially years to get a job if you're lucky -> find someone who also has a high paying job -> take on an amount more debt that your grandparents can't even visualize, and are yet responsible for -> kids?
- nurettin 1y ago
  Same here. All I had was a C= 64, its manual and several magazines which sometimes had printed 6502 assembly bytes. Took me three years to figure out how to poke them to the correct ram address.

constantcrying 1y ago

From what I have seen about Roblox, it is a game which parents should be extremely critical of and if I had children I would absolutely not let them play it. Not only are there repeat allegations of unfairness towards the player, Roblox also contains a stock market so that children can start gambling early. (See https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ) Besides that and far more disturbingly there are repeat and ongoing accusations of child abuse and child sexualization, which the company behind Roblox is ignoring. These accusations are bad enough that they have caused short selling of the company stocks.

lordgrenville 1y ago
Here is the report by (the late) Hindenburg Research about dangers to kids on Roblox. Can't vouch for the contents, but I think parents should at least skim it and take precautions. https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox https://hindenburgresearch.com/roblox