Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

Comment by le-mark | Hacker News Reader

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I suspected this maybe the case. I think there's an important distinction when relating your (and my) experience in the previous era with the current era. That is: expectations are much higher now. In the 80's we watched Matthew Broderick in Wargames having fantastic adventures with a green screen terminal and modem. We played pong, space invaders, and pac man. Today, kids use touch devices to watch videos on youtube and play triple A console games with incredible production quality.

I learned about computers with Murphy's Laws of Dos and Dos 4 on a monochrome screen. I knew that what I was doing was the same thing that professionals did

It's not obvious to kids today that that's what professionals are doing. As an adult I made a simple platformer and showed it to a few nontechnical friends. Their reactions were, 'why can't it do this', or 'are you going to fix the graphics?' ie very un-impressed, and honestly quite dis-spiriting. Imagine a kid creating a simple game today, won't impress her peers, and probably even lead to ridicule and scorn today.

I strongly believe consumers are blissfully unaware of how complex software can be (and what software is by nature more complex than what other software). It's not only a problem with the people you show your independent work to, it's a problem with non-technical management as well. I'd be very interested to understand a few of the ways non-technical people think programming works. If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating.

> If someone would put together some non-trivial demo, and get 100 non-technical people to speculate (in detail) on how they imagine it was made, I'd imagine the answers would be fascinating.

I've done a similar thought experiment over the years with (some very patient) non-technical friends, usually using some kind of mobile game on their phone...

They all more or less worked out the high-level concepts (events and listeners, input controls, the game loop, objects/models, persistence, networking, etc) but that was about it..

No one could even start to explain how it worked beyond that..

I'd agree, except for the word "blissfully". Go visit a games subreddit and you'll see tons of people who think programming is easy and are screaming that the devs are lazy money-grubbing idiots that should be doing things better. They aren't "blissful", just ignorant.

I think part of the yelling is the subconcious painfull realization of ones own lack of capabilitys.

These guys want to participate- as they did in cowboys and indians, and are unable to do so with just a stick and imagination.

That's a good point. I also spent a lot of time playing King's Quest II, which was simple enough that I could have created something similar (though much less sophisticated) at the same time.

This is perhaps why kids are learning to program later in life than our generation.

Ugh KQ2 was the worst. That's the one with the timer right? And you had to walk down that crazy path without falling and made it back before the evil wizard work up until you finally killed him ... and didn't one part of the game require you to rub the magic teleportation stone until you got somewhere you needed to?

> Their reactions were, 'why can't it do this', or 'are you going to fix the graphics?' ie very un-impressed, and honestly quite dis-spiriting.

I had this from my boss saying "I thought it was just going to send the email for me" which ultimately led to me learning some php basics that have come in handy ever since. I love non-developers ideas about what could/should be possible based on their own assumptions about technology, not mine. I realize that you had a crappy experience, just wanted to share what I see as the flipside.

Reminds me of, I can't remember which mathematician it was, that came in late one day to a lecture and copied two assignments from the blackboard. He handed them in late saying "they took longer than I thought."

It turned out they weren't homework assignments but unsolved problems in mathematics, and he had solved them (and later used them for his thesis).

I was a little after that and grew up with Qbasic and later Visual Basic. By that era, at least I was doing the same things managers were trying to do.

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