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I disagree. As a counter-example: I am 36 years old and have worked professionally creating software since I was 20. Sure, I tinkered with BASIC programming on

I disagree. As a counter-example: I am 36 years old and have worked professionally creating software since I was 20. Sure, I tinkered with BASIC programming on my first computer (the fabulous ZX81), but I first really got into programming in the early 90s with Turbo Pascal/Turbo Assembler in MS-DOS. In my world, Microsoft was completely dominant at this time. My own little pet theory on why younger people don't seem to do as much programming: Being online and having so easy access to so much information, entertainment, communication etc has generally made people more impatient and less willing to really commit to the kind of single minded focus that is needed to get into and really develop programming knowledge.

rdouble 13y ago
Intuitively I want to agree with you, as I've had similar thoughts , but is it really the case that younger people don't do as much programming? I'm around your age and almost nobody did programming when I was a kid, or even when I was first getting into the workforce. Now it seems like there are hacking meetups everywhere, millions of people posting their code to github, and more young people than ever to compete with for work.
- johansch 13y ago
  Yeah, it would be nice to have some hard data. My (probably quite random) data points are mostly from being involved in recruitment over the last ten years. I also didn't know anyone who was as much into programming when I was a kid. Now that everyone are online it is so much easier for people into particular things to find each other. It's not all bad, perhaps. :)
- zanny 13y ago
  We'll nobody programmed in general since computing was so new. The industry is just significantly larger now. The trend though I think is that computing has gotten huge but actually developing that computing hasn't grown at all in the youth group, just the consumption of that computing. You lose a lot of tinker-ability when you move to GUIs and especially when you don't distribute developer tools or learning resources. I mean, think of the generation growing on iphones. How would they ever get exposure to programming or tinkering on a device like that?
  - oscilloscope 13y ago
    Paragraf is a great app to make graphic shaders. It's easy to use touch x/y coordinates and the camera feed as a texture. The results look beautiful on retina displays. I've gotten several kids hooked on it, even overcoming some of the GLSL syntax hurdles to get their programs to work. I also gave them cheap $5 jeweller's loupes so they could inspect pixels as the program runs. Lots of kids genuinely want to create stuff.
zanny 13y ago
I'm not arguing there aren't exceptions, and maybe I should rephrase the time period - I'm talking about kids who never had DOS. They started their computing experiences on GUIs in Windows 95. I started on dos at around 2 - 3, and I know my personal interest in computing was heavily developed by the need to use a dos terminal for a few years. I know my younger brother, his peers, and pretty much everyone else I grew up with (not many 2 - 3 year olds played on a computer, but I liked playing Wolfenstein at that age) don't know what a terminal is, what code looks like, how to do terminal piping or navigate with terminal commands. Because they never saw it. I'm also not arguing there aren't exceptions, but my older cousin grew up on the c64 and spent ages 5 - 10 basically hacking on that thing. Tremendous growth experience in his eventual CS education. It went from upper middle class families owning a tinker box for their 5 - 15 year olds to upper middle class families signing kids up for facebook and cell phones before they hit 10. > Being online and having so easy access to so much information, entertainment, communication etc has generally made people more impatient and less willing to really commit to the kind of single minded focus that is needed to get into and really develop programming knowledge. I think they are easily distracted. I know I was, I went from scripting nwscript persistent worlds at 12 in NwN to playing wow all the time. I learned some lua there, and tweaked some addons, but I was effectively stuck on my programming experience from 13 - 18, though that was mostly because MMOs were a great escapism from horrible public education settings, and I liked turning my brain off at the time since I never really had a reason to turn it on. But as soon as I hit my senior year of high school I got my act in gear, mostly because I was tech-savvy from my earliest affiliations with computers, and against what Microsoft wanted me to do with my devices (hacking them). I set up dual boot Ubuntu, learned Python / Java, got my BS, and I've only gone down the rabbit hole since then. I've been soldering recently, run Arch, use terminals all the time, I recently did a cmos reset over 3.3v current on a router. But that required a spark that only really came from my most developmental years having to interact with computers as tinker boxes rather than colorful graphical click squares, and few of my peers got that experience.

rdouble 13y ago

Intuitively I want to agree with you, as I've had similar thoughts , but is it really the case that younger people don't do as much programming? I'm around your age and almost nobody did programming when I was a kid, or even when I was first getting into the workforce. Now it seems like there are hacking meetups everywhere, millions of people posting their code to github, and more young people than ever to compete with for work.

johansch 13y ago
Yeah, it would be nice to have some hard data. My (probably quite random) data points are mostly from being involved in recruitment over the last ten years. I also didn't know anyone who was as much into programming when I was a kid. Now that everyone are online it is so much easier for people into particular things to find each other. It's not all bad, perhaps. :)
zanny 13y ago
We'll nobody programmed in general since computing was so new. The industry is just significantly larger now. The trend though I think is that computing has gotten huge but actually developing that computing hasn't grown at all in the youth group, just the consumption of that computing. You lose a lot of tinker-ability when you move to GUIs and especially when you don't distribute developer tools or learning resources. I mean, think of the generation growing on iphones. How would they ever get exposure to programming or tinkering on a device like that?
- oscilloscope 13y ago
  Paragraf is a great app to make graphic shaders. It's easy to use touch x/y coordinates and the camera feed as a texture. The results look beautiful on retina displays. I've gotten several kids hooked on it, even overcoming some of the GLSL syntax hurdles to get their programs to work. I also gave them cheap $5 jeweller's loupes so they could inspect pixels as the program runs. Lots of kids genuinely want to create stuff.

zanny 13y ago

I'm not arguing there aren't exceptions, and maybe I should rephrase the time period - I'm talking about kids who never had DOS. They started their computing experiences on GUIs in Windows 95. I started on dos at around 2 - 3, and I know my personal interest in computing was heavily developed by the need to use a dos terminal for a few years. I know my younger brother, his peers, and pretty much everyone else I grew up with (not many 2 - 3 year olds played on a computer, but I liked playing Wolfenstein at that age) don't know what a terminal is, what code looks like, how to do terminal piping or navigate with terminal commands. Because they never saw it. I'm also not arguing there aren't exceptions, but my older cousin grew up on the c64 and spent ages 5 - 10 basically hacking on that thing. Tremendous growth experience in his eventual CS education. It went from upper middle class families owning a tinker box for their 5 - 15 year olds to upper middle class families signing kids up for facebook and cell phones before they hit 10. > Being online and having so easy access to so much information, entertainment, communication etc has generally made people more impatient and less willing to really commit to the kind of single minded focus that is needed to get into and really develop programming knowledge. I think they are easily distracted. I know I was, I went from scripting nwscript persistent worlds at 12 in NwN to playing wow all the time. I learned some lua there, and tweaked some addons, but I was effectively stuck on my programming experience from 13 - 18, though that was mostly because MMOs were a great escapism from horrible public education settings, and I liked turning my brain off at the time since I never really had a reason to turn it on. But as soon as I hit my senior year of high school I got my act in gear, mostly because I was tech-savvy from my earliest affiliations with computers, and against what Microsoft wanted me to do with my devices (hacking them). I set up dual boot Ubuntu, learned Python / Java, got my BS, and I've only gone down the rabbit hole since then. I've been soldering recently, run Arch, use terminals all the time, I recently did a cmos reset over 3.3v current on a router. But that required a spark that only really came from my most developmental years having to interact with computers as tinker boxes rather than colorful graphical click squares, and few of my peers got that experience.