It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer ago when a computer might dump you practically straight into BASIC when you turned it on or you might get access to a mainframe/minicomputer with programming tools already set up. Nowadays, an ‘easy’ introduction could involve the horrific process of installing and setting up python on windows (where it is hard to do things other than input/output text) or editing some html/JavaScript files where there are more easily possible interactive things but lots of things are difficult like ‘just drawing things’ or anything that requires a server side.

P.S. if you, like me, were wondering what Libera Chat is, it’s the moral successor of Freenode with Freenode now being a shell of its former self.