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Comment by yitchelle | Hacker News Reader

I sort of agree with you. I also started on BASIC on an Atari 800XL. What really got me hooked was the immediately result of it. It booted up into an environment where I can enter code directly, run it directly, debugging was a little painful and had to use prints. But the path to seeing something happen was pretty straight forward with very few obstacles.

In today's computer, I can't see any environment that would do that.

If my kids are presented with Visual Studio, I think they would spend the majority of their time clicking on the thousands of buttons on the ribbon, perhaps.

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Just to clarify, this is Visual Studio _Code_, not Visual Studio classic.

I'm also not necessarily suggesting that VS Code is the best tool there is. It's just a tool that I know a lot of the community has rallied behind (and which I'm personally a big fan of).

The article is more to suggest that I'd love to see more vendors provide their best work to these devices even if there isn't necessarily a large profit incentive to do so.

BASIC was an excellent environment for beginner computing. It was transparent, not too simple, not too hard, free from unnecessary complications, and it had a simple upgrade path to bare metal assembler. It provided access to graphics, sound, and animation within a single environment.

UNIX - any variant - is an absolutely terrible environment for beginner computing. It's inconsistent and incoherent, the security model makes no sense on a single-user machine, there are all kinds of unnecessary gotchas and "No, that doesn't work", the basic editing tools are unfamiliar ("Why doesn't the mouse work in nano?") and the pay off is relatively small. Programming sound, graphics, and animation can be a nightmare, even for professionals.

How about Windows? Worse than UNIX. MacOS? Arguably a better OS, but Xcode is about as friendly as an ill-tempered shark with a hangover.

Which is why I think these "Pi = BBC Micro" projects completely miss the point. The Pi is nothing like a BBC Micro, or a Spectrum, or any other popular 8-bit machine. It's more like a cheap/slow PC clone, and it has none of the immediacy and instant gratification of the original 8-bit scene.

It's the difference between being given a tiny universe you can totally own, and a much bigger universe that's confusing and doesn't seem to have edges.

The latter can be hugely demotivating to many kids who would thrive in the former.

I think today's equivalent to what I used to do (i.e. playing with an accidental ProDos prompt) is running the browser's developer console (which you most certainly can do on a chromebook) and perhaps running a shell on the RPi.

I don't really understand why a good editor is necessary in the sense of my old nostalgia or how I would try to streamline the learning/tinkering process today. While I see no specific value in anything in the gap between using whatever debugger/interaction the system offers to futz with the most visible levels and jumping to an online Python/processing/whatever notebook, I suppose starting anywhere that stokes one's curiosity is just as good as anywhere else.

I started with QBASIC in a command prompt within Windows 3. Definitely was hooked by the same things you mentioned - such as how quickly you can watch the computer "do" what you told it. It gave me the bug and the rest is history.

Nowadays, the closest I can think of is the interactive interpreter of python...but it's still not the same. Perhaps because python has orders of magnitude more libraries/functionality/gotchas out of the box. I think I would have been overwhelmed as a young teenager with all of that. Simple(and constrained maybe?) isn't such a bad thing for getting people their first taste.

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