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it's also relevant. mac's come with sqlite3, python, a terminal, a decent developing environment (extra cd). it's probably not a big deal for windows folks to

by diN0bot 18y ago

it's also relevant. mac's come with sqlite3, python, a terminal, a decent developing environment (extra cd). it's probably not a big deal for windows folks to download languages and developing environments, too, to say nothing of ubuntu. the web is a trove of treasure tutorials. open source and the web are thriving, the community is more inclusive and inviting than ever. more and more i run into artists, non-video game players, females, mechanical or electrical engineers and young folks discovering the joy of programming (arduino, processing, openframeworks, scratch and python are examples from recent interactions i've had). video game consoles might be less programmer-inviting than they used to be, but they're also catering to a more varied and more expecting audience than they used to.

jballanc 18y ago
Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces. Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that interesting is different today than it was when I started programming. I doubt today's 10 year old would be impressed by a text adventure...unfortunately...
- diN0bot 18y ago
  today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days. as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though. there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was available when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.
  - tsetse-fly 18y ago
    I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language. The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class. It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
    - plinkplonk 18y ago
      " I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language." I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on. Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.
  - gaius 18y ago
    I'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age. I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.

by diN0bot 18y ago

jballanc 18y ago

Sure, but I think _why's point is less about availability and more about approachability. As a 10 year old playing with BASIC, it took me all of a day or two to begin writing my first text adventure game. A few weeks after that, and I was writing graphical interfaces. Available tools are worth nothing if it's not painfully obvious how to make them do something interesting...and you have to remember that interesting is different today than it was when I started programming. I doubt today's 10 year old would be impressed by a text adventure...unfortunately...

diN0bot 18y ago
today's 10 year old is probably writing a twitter script in python in 2 days. as a non-video-game-playing female i didn't find programming approachable then, but i have found it approachable in the past 2 years. i can't speak for 10 year olds, though. there are numerous improvements in the approachability aspect (scratch, alice, processing, arduino on the educational front). i suspect approachability had little to do with you success as a 10 year old. your argument is simply that BASIC was available when you were 10 and now you can't think of modern fun tools and fun tasks. letsmakerobots and instructables come to mind as good starting places.
- tsetse-fly 18y ago
  I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language. The majority of today's 10 year olds are not writing twitter scripts. It requires a significant amount of understanding and time to do so. You need to pick a programming language, install it, figure out how to write your program and how to execute it. The barrier is a lot higher than writing a program for your calculator during math class. It'd be much easier for you to find people who wrote trivial programs on their Commodore when they were 10 than it would be to find 10 year olds who are writing python.
  - plinkplonk 18y ago
    " I think approachability is absolutely key. Kids wrote programs on their Commodores, Ataris, and TI calculators because the environment was already setup. You could type in a few commands and instantly have something running (a program that solves the area of a triangle or one that plays a cool sequence of tones). There's only one editor and one language." I agree. If Commodores or Amigas were available today, I'd buy one for my 5 year old nephew so that he could fiddle around with it, play some simple games, write some small programs and so on. Maybe there is a market for a small computing device that has the "instantly have something running, but is completely hackable" characteristic.
- gaius 18y ago
  I'm an experienced developer, but when I wanted to write a Jabber 'bot in Python, well, it took longer to get an account for it from our Domain Admins than it took to write. In 50 lines I had something that was doing useful work (in this case, relaying alerts from the monitoring system into a Jabber conference). This sort of thing is incredibly accessible to anyone who wants to do it. The stuff an 10-year-old with a free language and an ADSL connection can do today dwarfs what I could do at that age. I think _why rather likes the idea of himself as the Pied Piper, but the situation is nowhere near as bleak as he makes out.