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Comment by misterman0 | Hacker News Reader

Thx for straightening me out.

Ok, so let's blame 8085, 8086 or 8088.

Or, we (as in I) can blame no one and instead, only realize there's no blame to manage.

Anyway, I regret that we killed 6502. I hope my kids will pick up programming anyway. I think later in life they will feel crippled if they didn't.

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> Or, we (as in I) can blame no one and instead, only realize there's no blame to manage.

I agree, I think the problem was not a particular microprocessor, but a greater cultural issue. At the end of home computer era, a PC has became someone's workbench, end users are not expected to learn and write programs anymore. There were bright sides, Xerox Alto, GUI, desktop publishing, multimedia, widely-available programs, no need to repeat those stories, we all know them. Meanwhile, accessibility to programming has largely been lost in this process.

On second thought, it's not all black-and-white, some accessibility to programming still exists. On Unix-like systems, "python", "perl" is one command away, and even on Windows, JavaScript is one browser window away. If the next generation rewrites the computing history today, I wonder what tools/environment would be seen as the 21st century equivalent of 6502 and home computers. I'm sure it would have a dedicated chapter to Raspberry Pi and Arduino devboards at least.

>> even on Windows, JavaScript is one browser window away

I have nothing but love for Bill Gates' software. I programmed my vic 20 using his BASIC.

In my twenties I had no trouble picking up WINTEL + JS. But that's because I had already learnt what is computing. I had already realized what is a virtual machine and what is a "high-level language".

When I try to explain to my kids the architecture that is today's computing I don't know where to start. Now I wish there where sprites. When I was ten I grasped the concept or sprites.

There is a fair amount of cargo-culting in the following statement but I still believe in it:

If we had maintained the 8-bit architecture and even 6502 as a "gateway drug", today, we would be much better off. Talent is hard to find, in my mind, because there is no longer a C64.

It's not even that. You just need something simple to get started with that produces instant results and is built in to the computer.

Ex: VBScript, bash, python, etc.

You don't explain everything from scratch.

You are suggesting, are you not, that top-down is as good as bottom-up?

To that I disagree. I believe what caught my interest was the bottom-up approach that was the commodore manuals.

The original discussion was accessibility to programming, and now it's top-down vs. bottom-up programming, which is a different topic. But IMHO, even if you believe top-down is not as good as bottom-up, it's still better than your original parent comment, which explicitly mentioned no programming at all.

>> and now it's top-down vs. bottom-up

You're right, it's a different topic entirely. I was trying to enforce the notion of the 8-bit architecture being superior to our current to beginners because of how easy it was to comprehend, even at the hardware level.

Looking again at my kids, I'm starting to question my initial premise that everyone should learn programming. They seem to want to become either the best fruit market owner in the world or the next Zlatan.

A lot of people who learned programming in the home computer era learned through BASIC which was already a very high level language (well, except perhaps the C64 one which was kinda crippled, but that was an exception), often with graphics commands to draw lines, circles, etc, play sounds, do color, etc. Some of them went on to learn assembly, but that came later, after they got their feet wet with the high level BASIC.

This isn't any different than someone learning -say- Python or JS today and then moving on to C or C++. If anything, i know artists in the game industry who started learning Python to automate some stuff in their workflow and then slowly started using C# and C++ (often such people end up as "technical artists" in bigger teams, which is an in-between artists and graphics programmers, implementing high level systems for artists and designers on top of the low level systems graphics programmers provide).

At the 8 bit computers and some of the 16 bit home computers they all came with aversion of BASIC. That meant people with even different machines could trade information.

I am not saying which language microcomputers should come, just that if all the microcomputer came with the same language from day one we would see a lot more people programming today.

Personally, I don't like Pascal and I know a lot of people are against BASIC. What about Comal? You need something that is easy to program the simple stuff, but has the ability to teach good programming style.

There was nothing remotely close to the Python infrastructure we have now, complete with fairly advanced software constructs in fairly accessible manner. Also keep in mind that there are other engineering disciplines than software. In those disciplines, the key is becoming an expert user in a a very high level tool, such as LT Spice, Solidworks, various FEA packages, etc., and even higher level more specialized tools. There, to design something, there is no time to fiddle with actual coding, unless you’re a graduate student actually writing a new tool.

There's still a little cottage industry of 6502 (and its successor, 65816) homebrew computers[1]. You can still buy them from electronics distributors[2]. There's also a very good Basic[3] available. Building one of these may be a good learning experience with kids.

1908s computers were way simpler, and with far fewer distractions than modern machines.

[1] http://6502.org/homebuilt [2] https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Western-Design-Center-W... [3] http://retro.hansotten.nl/lee-davison-web-site/enhanced-6502...

What's to keep you from picking up a an Apple IIc on eBay?

I think buying an Apple ][ missed the point. I think misterman0 meant to say is not the specific issue of teaching his own children to write programs, but accessibility to programming in general (I invited my brother to play a text based adventure game [...] He was eight. I was still ten.), and how the low accessibility has buried many potentially talented children from exploring it by themselves (I have two kids now. 9 and 12. They are brighter than me. [...] My son started his YT channel at the age of 8. Mostly in game footage. He uses down pretty cool sw to edit his clips.).

I was one of those kids with an Apple ][ and in fact I still own it. I thought about setting it up for my own kids (now 16 and 18) years ago to tinker with. But I realized that it wasn’t due to accessibility that they aren’t interested in programming. Times change and my things aren’t their things. If they wanted to program, there’s a lot of modern and accessible environments to start with. They had plenty of friends doing things like LEGO mindstorms or finding other ways to program. I realized they were no more interested in programming than learning how to change a spark plug when I tried to show them that. And it wasn’t because computing (like many other things) has become more complex.

I’m not really even sure computing is less accessible now. Kids find a way.

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