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Comment by rdouble | Hacker News Reader

Intuitively I want to agree with you, as I've had similar thoughts , but is it really the case that younger people don't do as much programming? I'm around your age and almost nobody did programming when I was a kid, or even when I was first getting into the workforce. Now it seems like there are hacking meetups everywhere, millions of people posting their code to github, and more young people than ever to compete with for work.

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We'll nobody programmed in general since computing was so new. The industry is just significantly larger now. The trend though I think is that computing has gotten huge but actually developing that computing hasn't grown at all in the youth group, just the consumption of that computing. You lose a lot of tinker-ability when you move to GUIs and especially when you don't distribute developer tools or learning resources.

I mean, think of the generation growing on iphones. How would they ever get exposure to programming or tinkering on a device like that?

Paragraf is a great app to make graphic shaders. It's easy to use touch x/y coordinates and the camera feed as a texture.

The results look beautiful on retina displays. I've gotten several kids hooked on it, even overcoming some of the GLSL syntax hurdles to get their programs to work. I also gave them cheap $5 jeweller's loupes so they could inspect pixels as the program runs.

Lots of kids genuinely want to create stuff.

Yeah, it would be nice to have some hard data. My (probably quite random) data points are mostly from being involved in recruitment over the last ten years.

I also didn't know anyone who was as much into programming when I was a kid. Now that everyone are online it is so much easier for people into particular things to find each other. It's not all bad, perhaps. :)

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