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Comment by kar1181 | Hacker News Reader

And just look at how much simpler it is compared to modern kids programming materials. The code is denser but there's less of it, and far far less bootstrapping.

I think that is the killer right now, the amount of barriers to moving pixels on the screen is very high relative to how it was for us on the 8bits.

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I'm playing with DragonRuby now [1]. It lacks a lot (but is coming along very rapidly). It's aimed at adults wanting to build real games, but what appealed to me was exactly that the barrier to get started is extremely low compared to most game engines out there. I particularly dislike the IDE-based ones that expects you to learn a custom environment and build a lot of the game visually.

[1] https://dragonruby.itch.io/

I love GLBasic. It's a basic with types (sort of classes). Also has 3D grafics but I mostly used it for 2D. It's on steam now and can export to several platforms other than windows. It has been around for quite a while, there is little to no bootstrapping needed and it's fast. You can also write inline C if you need more speed. I haven't had the chance to try android export yet but I have seen some people from the community put up things there recently so it does work.

[1] http://www.glbasic.com/

The kids of today would probably much more interested in doing something fun with their smartphones than doing something on a fatass PC.

A smartphone is actually much more interesting than a computer, when you look at it (camera, microphone, gyroscope, GPS, Bluetooth...).

But how do you write a program to run on your phone?

Compile golang with GOOS=android and run the tool in Termux for example.

I don't know if it's actually simpler than Scratch.

On the other hand if you want something like this for kids now there's Pico-8.

https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

Even has a discount for teachers. Only one copy needed for the entire class in school

https://www.lexaloffle.com/info.php?page=schools

TIC-80 is pretty nice too.

Another killer is that kids expect much more from a computer nowadays. Being able to move around a block on the screen was something that you could impress your nerd friends with, but today, what can you possibly program in a few lines of code to impress kids?

https://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=%23tweetcart&src=typed_q...

Actually kids can be pretty impressed if they did the program themselves. They think it's all magic until they try it on their own, also makes them more understanding for others work and bugs. Less acidic when it comes to judging others work on the play-store.

Expectations are also much higher.

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