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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I call bs. The cost of entry to get to basic used to be turning the computer on. If you had one, you did this every time you used it.

Contrast with modern computers. Even the raspberry pi environment offers a ton more.

I picked up turtle geometry the other day and realize I don't have an obvious place to try the stuff they are doing. Which feels really really off.

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My niece spent 30 seconds on the App Store and now has a place to write and run python scripts on her iPhone.

Cost to entry was basically zero.

I'm curious to know what she is using. Allowing access to the app store is not something I'm encouraging, for what feels like obvious reasons.

Pythonista (http://omz-software.com/pythonista/)

Looks like the cost of entry was $9.99 ;)

The Raspberry Pi offers a tonne more since it is trying to be everything to everyone, at least in the domain of computer education. I agree that this obscures the obvious place to start, yet it also has some benefits. For example, there are Python libraries for GPIO. While interfacing electronics projects with a 1980's vintage computer was certainly possible, it did not afford such ease.

On the flip side is RISC OS on the Raspberry Pi. The OS is pretty much stuck in the 1990's with some throwbacks to the 1980's. For example: it is easy to drop into BASIC, then write programs as you would in the early days of personal computers.

My point of bringing in the pi was that it feels closest to the computers I had growing up. Tinkering was and is the point. Most computing devices, that is not the case.

>While interfacing electronics projects with a 1980's vintage computer was certainly possible, it did not afford such ease.

One of my favorite examples of interfacing 1980s micros with electronics is 8 Bit Guy's[0] series on interfacing with LCD character with the Commodore 64's user port[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/adric22

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV8FbwobrKY

Python has a built in turtle module.

Maybe someone could set up one of the little Micropython capable boards to boot into iPython. I wonder if any of the ESP32 boards have VGA or HDMI?

Edit: this should work https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19943059

That is news to me. Thanks! I'll have to look more at it.

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