Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by analog31 | Hacker News Reader

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(As a father of two kids, I admit it is wickedly difficult to get them honestly interested in programming.)

I've experienced the same thing. One observation is that "back in my day," you could learn enough programming in a few weeks to hack something together that looked just as good (bad) as real software, with little or no adult guidance. And programmers were a community of nerds, hackers, scientists, etc. Hacking was much closer to bare metal, so it felt more "real" too, rather than digging through someone else's drawers.

And it was cool to be able to do something that my parents couldn't even fathom.

Today, programming has become professionalized, and way too hard, with functioning software requiring layers of abstraction. It has changed from a private passion to a varsity sport, and the kids who have declared an interest in "computer science" are the most straight-laced, helicopted kids in the whole school. Some kids discover that there's still a hacker subculture, but only by luck.

Granted, all of this stuff has been good for me, career-wise, but that doesn't translate into something of interest to my kids.

I agree with this, but I think there's an additional point here. I'm from (I'm assuming based on context) a generation just past yours. I know many programmers older than me who had childhood experiences in which figuring out how to build their own games or random software was extremely formative. I think part of what made that so formative was that the gap between "professional software" and what they could build was extremely minimal, if existent.

For me, I can distinctly remember deciding to tinker with building games when I was very young. I was completely overwhelmed, however, by the jump from "basic Batch programs" to "OpenGL and C++." Obviously, that's an enormous jump, and I could have simply dabbled with Flash or whatever, but the point is that the software I enjoyed playing with was years and years of dedicated learning away from anything I could build or tinker with.

The web, however, was not. It was still nascent, there weren't mature, robust technologies for it, and I could build all the things I saw online completely on my own with maybe a dedicated weekend. This was huge for me, and kicked off my lifelong involvement in computing.

I guess the point that I'm getting at is that technology is so good now that the gap between what an average child can consume and what they can produce is enormous. When I tried teaching my nephew basic scripting, their first questions were "How do I make it do X" where X is some involved bit of graphical interactivity. That level of development simply is what software is to them now.

My hope is that this is cyclical. That there is always another frontier cropping up where the gap between "state of the art" and "hobby project" is incredibly small. I think that is naturally where you'll see kids getting into development.

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