Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chao- | Hacker News Reader

I don't have enough knowledge of native graphics libraries, nor of WebGL, to speak to the core issue in this article. But, as a young'n, the last line really strikes a chord with me.

I will never experience the joy people had fiddling around with their Apple II's and I still don't know the first thing about the Commodore 64 besides the name. My attitude toward the "How will the kids ever learn unless they can tinker with it?" nostalgia that comes up on HN has always been: "Meh. No one I work with had an Apple II, and we all still ended up as tech-types."

That said, the first computer I owned myself ran Windows 98, and the first thing I learned to do with it was noodle around in HTML and JavaScript. Well, Okay. It was second thing I learned to do, after installing Sim City 2000 and wasting a week's worth of time.

It was very poignant to realize all at once how the internet provided a chance to be part of an easily-accessible ecosystem, one where you could tell a computer to do something and it just did it. Even if it was in a browser.

Buy an old computer from your local classifieds site/paper; it'll cost you $15 or something including working disks, mags and books. And start coding on it (and hardware tinkering if you like that); it's like a Bonzai tree; it makes a brilliant and relaxing hobby. If you do this a few hours / week, you'll get that serene feeling (at least I do :) of something which is very fulfilling without the stress of HAVING to do it (Javascript is also a job of many and that gives the mixes/stressy feelings).

In a year or so you will understand fully a) what we are on about b) how very cheap and simple things can be very fulfilling c) why 'older folks' sometimes sigh when yet a faster CPU is eaten 100% by Windows while not significant seems to have changed d) how your computer works internally ; if you are interested on the digital pulse and IC level (I can extend my MSX computers using 74series logic ICs, which is, again very fulfilling) e) how you can do stuff efficiently in very little memory on very slow computers.

That e) point is something which might not seem valuable, but it is and it still is; if you know how to do things on these computers, you understand how computers work and why some assembly code is much slower than other. Although computers are vastly more complex these days, you can extrapolate quite a bit on high level and it will be easier to read current tech documentation about hardware (and software) as well.

Anyway; I would recommend everyone to at least try this as I strongly believe it will help current generation understand better. It's also better for your children (and children of others you might know) to let them tinker and learn this young instead of playing XBOX 360 games (that's my opinion but I believe it sticks). Maybe their friends won't be as impressed with them trying to implement a ray caster on a 3.58 mhz machine, but when they get to 12 they can program the Next Great App and win science fairs while the others, well, can play Skyrim.

I see there is a lot of nostalgia in that post that I (and others like me) will probably never understand. But, I still don't see the point.

It's nice that we could buy and old machine and program something on it. But at the same time we could do it in Javascript, on the web with a very pretty interface. So why should we trade all the knowledge, the tools and the languages that we (well, people like you how tend to get all nostalgic over this topic) have built and and write something on an archaic system?

I never had such an old system, yet at the same time, I understand the constraints more or less, I now a bit of assembler, C and still question where this knowledge is really benefiting me. (Though I do find it very interesting!)

If I want to have a constraint environment, I could join a JavaScript 1k challenge and also work with artificial constraints (at the same time I could still enjoy the modern tools, environments and even graphics).

Maybe I just really don't see the point.

And to your last point, I think a better approach would be to show our children either PyGame or even modding tools for modern games. I just don't think a young child would really be that interested in the archaic inner workings of a slow machine, but could be really interested in making mods. I'm not saying there are no such children around (I'm sure there are), I'm just questioning the approach here.

I don't think you see the point :)

The point is that there is, in essence, no point. That's the same as the point of working on a Bonzai tree. It has no point except that you can come to inner/outer peace and beauty.

If you read carefully you see that actually I see 'few hours per week', so there is no mentioning of 'trade all the knowledge'; you are not going to work on ancient stuff fulltime.

For children you might be right; I just know what I was like and what the kids I hung out with were like; I grew up in the 80ties and significant parts of that I spent disassembling, soldering, recreating and such of OLD (50-60s) radio's. Because they are EASY to understand and master.

My issue with PyGame for children (versus for instance an Arduino kid, Rasberry PI or Xgamestation or, much cheaper and better documented, an ancient computer) is that I have seen many kids growing up like that (replace PyGame with VB or HTML) and they don't have A CLUE how a computer works. And when they try to learn that, it is hard to make that step from this, basically, blackbox system to how it actually works. You got that, but many don't.

But yes, I'm biased, I just know quite a few people who followed me and are happy with it; I just summed up stuff I/we get from that. I'm probably just crazy :) And I do know you can do this in JS too but people just don't because their computeres are powerful enough to do it with a ton of fancy libs and tools. In my experience it ends up people (and yes there are exceptions; you are probably one of them) just being lazy.

The point is that there is, in essence, no point. That's the same as the point of working on a Bonzai tree.

Well, if there is truthfully no point, you could replace working on an ancient computer with actually working on a Bonzai tree, or a rock garden, etc.

But I would assume you meant more "There is no point, aside from gaining an appreciate for how machines worked in an older, more basic form" heh.

I think you can replace it with that (I used to do other stuff for relaxation and focus change, I just now like this more), but i think you'll get more out of an old computer than a rock garden :)

I think the point is that there's very real value in understanding how the machine works at a low level. While it might seem like arcana, and while you might think that you understand the constraints more or less and be aware of how the machine is programmed, the value comes from actually asking the hardware questions using those methods.

Unless you're very lucky, at some point in your career your high-level development is going to get constrained by some very low-level fundamentals. Knowing what's going on in the machine is going to be key to working your way through it.

Not to mention the fact that you'll have the ingrained mentality to always think about the performance and bottlenecks in your code and systems, even if you're highly unlikely to ever hit practical limits.

Knowing that stuff -- more importantly being an experienced practitioner -- just makes you a better programmer overall, and makes you more sympathetic to the hardware that has to execute your code. It's a dying skill and it's very far from being nostalgia when it can bite you in the real world very easily.

That's the point.

I don't fully understand the parent's point either, but I think there is value in learning and using different systems, even as a hobby. As you agree with, programming a low level system can't be done with the same tools as you are used to, you won't have the same convenience, and you might have to do things differently, even think differently about otherwise common problems. There seems to be plenty of learnings in there.

The closest I've gotten my oldest son to be interested in programming was a few weeks ago, when I did the classic

    10 PRINT "Hello! ";
    20 GOTO 10

on the AppleWin emulator I installed on his laptop. It kept him interested for a few hours, but after that he wandered away to play Minecraft instead.

There's so much joy inside that "]" prompt but I'm not sure how to get him to see it.

That little program is what got me interested in programming as a kid.

I played games nonstop on my (parents') Apple II, and loved it. But seeing those two lines of code produce "Hello!" over and over on the screen blew my mind.

You see, I thought games were amazing because I could manipulate these little worlds, and I could doing anything imaginable within their rulesets. But, seeing "Hello!" scroll forever and ever made me realize that, with this coding thing, there were no rules. The fact that I could make this computer do whatever I wanted, if only I could speak its language, was irresistible.

So of course, I modified the program to say "Hello sray!" and "Hello <this>" and "Hello <that>" and "Sray's brother smells", and so on and so forth. And then I figured out how to add spaces to each line to make a cool zig-zag effect. And so on and so forth... most of us know how it goes.

Anyway, this little trip down nostalgia lane isn't going to help you get your son interested in coding. But it's interesting how different kids react to the same thing.

It was better back when you could totally freak your teacher out simply by running a simple program like that in class after you finished the assignment before anyone else.

Well, I was allowed to play 3rd party games 1 hour per day max; the rest of the time I was allowed behind my computer but not playing games. So what else to do with that great machine than make games myself? It worked well for me and still does.

You could always install DOSBOX and GW-BASIC. Then you can play around with the PLAY statement (feed it a string of notes), the SOUND statement (feed it frequencies) and the DRAW/LINE/PRESET/COLOR/PALETTE statements (draw coloured shapes on the screen).

I remember, at age 8 or 9, being so proud of myself for having developed an app that played a couple of complete songs using SOUND in tandy basic on our first PC (an 8088 w/ a whopping huge 10MB hard drive).

My father (an amateur singer), used the "Wind beneath My Wings" version for to warm up before practice.

When I was 10 I started reading a VB book and was inordinately proud of myself for learning how to customize the toolbars in the IDE. I just assumed that that was a major part of programming. I also misunderstood the part on autocompletion and thought it meant most of your code was autogenerated.

I wasn't the most tech-literate child, but at least I've come a decent way since then.

Damn I feel old. I was using GW-BASIC when I was 8 :-(

Me: PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececececececececececec"

My dad: * runs out to answer the "telephone" *

Me: * trollface

I learnt to program with GW-BASIC when I was 13 and, as you say, it had all these high level built in functions that made easy getting results.
Most of the stuff I programmed when I was 13 was crap, but it was amazingly funny!
Today I would recommend Python to start tinkering, but to be honest I think it was easier back then. My PC had 512KB of RAM (it doesn't matter, GW-BASIC allowed only 64KB for both your code and your data), CGA graphic card (4 colors), 8MHz CPU and no HDD disk; and even with all these limitations, I think it was easier than Python + PyGame.

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