The legitimacy of the company that produced Mario, etc. will rub off onto a new generation of kids and make them feel like they are really playing with the big boys.

I don't know how to explain this right. I know that I myself still get this feeling when I see something I wrote running on an actual Atari Jaguar because I was such a fan of that console when I was a kid. It's like, "wow, I'm actually a real developer! I made it!"

I start thinking about all the things I can do and all of the possibilities that are more than just firing pixels on a screen.

It's a form of technological empowerment, and it's something that makes a huge difference in a kid's life. I know it did for me when I first discovered BASIC on the Commodore.

Not wrong, per se, but a super-technical HN reader was not the target of Dropbox, and I feel like it's the same situation here.

While you could, I guess, plug your HDMI cable from your computer running your first hello world python program onto a screen, I think there's something much more tangible and incredible to a child to run their own code on the device they usually play video games on. As a 10 year old, I would flux around with the debugger cheat in my Star Wars n64 game and think "well obviously these numbers change the color of fog, but how on earth did they code the actual game? The characters? The lasers?" What's being demonstrated here is "look kids, it IS possible for YOU to write code and run it on a video game console! YOU can become a game developer, if you learn about this stuff!"

Another anecdote - my uncle gave me his old computer to pull to pieces, I wanted to know how it went from circuits to showing Windows on the screen. I finally get to what he kept calling the "motherboard" and "processor," which he said is where most of the work is happening. So I pulled off the processor, disappointed at just seeing more circuits. He said there was even more circuitry inside it, so I cracked it open to find a black blob of I guess silicon. Nothing revealing how it worked! "What'd you expect to find," he asked, "a brain?" Imagine if the gap had someone been bridged by the existence of arduinos back then, or even just redstone in minecraft - a direct link between logic gates and, say, a calculator working.

It was without a doubt significantly easier to start programming when the process consisted of hook the Commodore up to the TV, plop in your disks/tape, and write in a dead simple language that can be largely described in a few short pages. We haven't had anything like that for years; a spiritual successor to BASIC on a set hardware and software environment (the Switch) is as close as we'll probably come in this day and age.