Hacker News Reader

Comment by zyb09 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this will have an effect on how kids get into programming. Back when I was a kid we had MS-DOS, my primary motivation was to install and play games, but there was this easy built-in pathway of: Hey, you can do a lot more with this machine if you want, including making your own games.

Nowadays consuming and developing are so disconnected, it seems almost impossible for the younger generations to just stumble upon it like many people did back then.

View on HN

The curiosity is still there in kids though, and that's what matters when it comes to learning game development. Around the age of 11 or 12 I got curious, and discovered Game Maker which at the time was a very simple little tool with a simple graphics editor and some action/event blocks you could drag in order to make things move. Making some basic puzzle games with this was easy, but anything more complicated required diving into the built-in scripting language GML (Game Make Language) that I've long since forgotten.

After that I also played with flash games, disassembling them using some strange tool into a kind-of assembly-like code where I tweaked values and instructions to see what happened.

Some time around 15-16 years old, Minecraft became popular in my school. This was what tipped me over to more traditional programming, because there was already a modding community which provided tools for easy deobfuscation of its classes. Instead of revising for GCSEs, I made a small number of mods including elemental creepers which became popular enough to earn a small amount of ad revenue. Something like £20-30 a month for nearly 2 years wasn't great money, but as a kid it maintained my phone contract and a library of games on steam to play.

EDIT: Can't forget Ludum Dare, switching from Java to C# after my first LD experience improved my programming a lot even though the languages have a lot of similarities.

Sure, kids these days may not just happen to stumble upon the code of a game by opening its BASIC file in a text editor, but with curiosity and the internet it is very easy to begin learning from a young age. For me, this all started ~11 years ago, but I'm sure everything I did with my curiosity is still possible for kids today.

I think the kids who are likely to become good programmers are already tinkering with things. They will discover what they can do with a computer, one way or another. If anything, getting started in programming is easier these days, since you have a full dev environment in your browser and tutorials everywhere.

I would like to think that the industry learned the error of its ways.

The 1980s and 1990s were prime times for kids getting into programming. Early personal computers came with BASIC. Early HTML and JavaScript were simple enough for a child to get into. That seemed to fall apart in the 2000s when programming languages did not come standard with personal computers and the growing complexity of web development made it increasingly difficult to create anything exciting by the standards of the day. Those were also the times when programming books geared towards kids seemed to disappear.

Of course many of the modern efforts are much more artificial since they rely upon programming languages geared towards kids. Yet that is the price of complexity. Regardless of what the article's author argues, modern devices are much more complex under the hood. Much of that complexity bleeds into the tools that would appeal to the inner nerd. Languages geared towards kids both reduce that complexity and add to the excitement of creating more sophisticated programs. Children who learn them will have the basics to leap into "real" programming languages.

The other thing that we have witnessed over the past few years is a renewed interest in books geared towards children of most ages. For a while the best that I saw were titles geared towards teens and determined tweens. Now it is possible to find Python (and Ruby) books that mirror some of the BASIC books that were written for children in the early 1980s.

Things are getting better, even if walled gardens are leading some people to claim otherwise.

For me I found it way harder to get into programing in the 90's, as a kid in this decade I really wanted to make my own games and software but being on a Mac I couldn't find how to cross the gap, you didn't have BASIC like before with the Apple II or MSDOS, it was full-featured GUI with expensive compilers or nothing. Now any kid can open the dev console in a browser and write javascript, or even create basic HTML files. Maybe we should encourage more quick and dirty approach and avoid recommending frameworks and complex build processes for hobbyist projects.

What about HyperCard?

But even in the MS-DOS era things were disconnected because with the exception of things like DONKEY.BAS, nearly every game was a sourceless executable. On mini-computers and early microcomputers, games like "Star Trek" and "Lemonade Stand" were written in BASIC, meaning that you could dive in and modify the games you had just been playing.

> sourceless executable

This doesn't matter, the point is the option to do more was always present. Kids are curious and if the option exists at least a few will find it and try to understand it.

Sure you didn't have the sourcecode to Doom but QBasic was always there and to copy games off your friends and even run them you had to at least understand a few basic commands and intricacies of the OS. Not just tap store > tap install.

This was precisely the concern that led Eben Upton to develop the Raspberry Pi.

The idea was to make a cheap, small, device that booted to a prompt so that you interacted with it in the same way that you would have interacted with the DOS prompt. You could then have a few of these in schools etc so children could play with it without the concern that they would brick an expensive piece of kit.

It's clearly ended up vastly more successful than was originally envisaged. It remains to be seen, of course, whether it has inspired another generation of hackers or not.

In saying that I notice that a lot of the developers I work with who are gamers always seem to know a lot more than me about networking. I assume that its related to setting up LAN parties and the likes.

Maybe this is changing, but in my generation, gamers are typically more proficient in a lot of the low-level nuts and bolts. Modding was such a big force in pc gaming, and typically the tools to do it were a little sketchy and rough.

I remember hacking around in data files for Civilization II, or poking at python scripts for Mount & Blade, way before I learned any proper programming.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com