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Comment by tlrobinson | Hacker News Reader

TI graphing calculators got a bunch of people in my "generation" interested (I'm 25). My first non-trivial program was snake in TI BASIC.

I think this generation's equivalent is probably iPhone.

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What's sad about that is that the iPhone is a lot harder to develop for, so it will get a lot less people interested. Rather than just opening up the "iPhone-Basic" app and fiddling around for a bit with an exceedingly simple and easy-to-learn language, you have you get a Mac, get registered, get XCode, and spend quite a while learning Objective-C and Cocoa, and to actually draw anything on the screen, probably OpenGL ES as well.

iPhone is what got me interested. I bought a Mac, one of the best moves I've ever made, and dove in. The learning curve was almost insurmountably steep, and in the two years since I've found web programming to be a much better use of my time. You can build an iPhone app, but what are you going to connect it to? For me a website, but how do you build a website? The meandering process has been a lot of fun, but I don't know how one could start with iPhone programming. By the way, I'm 31.

I think this generation's equivalent is probably iPhone.

At a holiday dinner yesterday, a friend's kid (11) wanted to know how to make games for his iPod Touch. The conversation ended at "well, you need to buy a Mac, first."

The costs are pretty high, even by North American standards. My first computing system cost less than $200, I think. Getting started with iPhone development will set one back $1500.

Sure, but I didn't buy a graphing calculator to start programming, I already had one for school. Many students already have Macs and iPhones.

If I had thought I could make lots of money (by teenagers' standards) selling graphing calc apps then I probably would have become a hermit.

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