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Comment by ArekDymalski | Hacker News Reader

"In a way, the ORIC-1 was so mesmerizing because it stripped computing down to its most basic form: you typed some instructions; it did something cool. This was the computer's essential magic laid bare. Somehow ten or twenty lines of code became shapes and sounds; somehow the machine breathed life into a block of text."

Oh, yeah. I still remember that feeling from Atari 65xe and then C-64. Now it's much harder to get such instant gratification. While trying to revive my passion and learn new stuff as an adult I also failed several times, because I set my aspirations too high and wasn't able to quickly learn all the necessary stuff at once :) Nowadays the path to "cool things" seems to be much harder, until you adjust your personal definition of cool.

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I got that feeling recently learning iOS. I had previously taken many programming courses where everything happened in the console, and to go from that to storyboards and the robust UIKit frameworks got me hooked. I've been teaching myself and have slowly progressed from newb to relatively competent in the last six months. I still have a lot to learn, but I'm enjoying the learning process in a way I never thought I would.

I think a lot of people have a preferred "style" of development, and some are unfortunately deterred when the first they're introduced to doesn't quite suit them.

Take for example MATLAB vs. Scheme vs. C vs. Java vs Python. All very different ways of programming, all very valid, but everyone has their own style they prefer.

I think today you get that kind of interactive computing with something like the IPython notebook. You can load an image, apply an effect on it and immediately see the result. You can lookup documentation interactively too.

If anything, I think nowadays there are too much cool things, and the challenge is figuring out what can be achieved with them in a small number of steps, instead of getting lost.

Yes, Python seems to be the closest thing to BASIC and the abundance of cool things is really distracting indeed. Thanks for pointing me to iPython, I haven't heard about it before.

You should check out a modern Smalltalk environment like Pharo so as to find this interactivity taken to its ultimate conclusion (relative to what we have).

> If anything, I think nowadays there are too much cool things, and the challenge is figuring out what can be achieved with them in a small number of steps, instead of getting lost.

And which are actually important to know vs. which will fade in less than a year.

Cool things are rarely important to know, even if they stay cool for a long time. The important thing when starting programming is to have fun. You don't need to keep the knowledge. When I was learning programming in BASIC on C64 I knew that's not the language people write real programs in, but it was still fun and it thought me to think analytically and gave me some technical basics.

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