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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

The problem isn't a lack of devices with the bare bones showing, where tinkering will produce results to be learned. The problem is that some things, like iPhone apps, are so much more polished than anything the average 12-year-old can produce that anything they make is discouraging by comparison.

How many teenagers would it take to produce Candy Crush, a highly-polished game made by a team of teams -- art team, multiple app coding teams, database team, facebook integration teams, financial team, and management team. Man-years of effort went into making that game.

Now be 12. Be a gamer. Be a kid who's choosing between struggling to make HTML5 Canvas work on a webpage, and playing games with friends.

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Absolutely. Here in the UK, we had an astonishing programming renaissance in the 1980s, fuelled largely by the Sinclair micros. They were pretty awful computers by most measures, but they were also very cheap, so they sold in their millions.

A talented teenager could spend a few weeks writing a game and realistically hope to see it commercially published. Even the most ambitious games took no more than a few man-months. Several major UK games studios were founded by people in their teens and early twenties during this period, most famously Codemasters. Nobody really knew what they were doing and games were something of a cottage industry, so there were no real barriers to entry. There was a distinct punk sensibility, with weird and irreverent games being published on cheaply-duplicated cassettes.

The British programming boom also benefited from a variety of other factors - the BBC taking a major interest in promoting microcomputers, a very supportive government and an exchange rate that made Japanese consoles punitively expensive.

This documentary tells that story: http://www.frombedroomstobillions.com/

Since when do 12 year olds compare themselves against highly polished products put out by companies with hundreds of employees?

When I was 12 I wasn't trying to build Seven Cities Of Gold, I was happy just to have a little blinking sprite move across the screen.

Nowadays you can fire up a browser and scratchpad and have a hello world alert box pop up in five seconds. And there are arduinos, and raspberry pi's, and crazy cool robotics kits. There's still plenty out there to motivate kids who are interested in tinkering.

When I was 9, my parents got a 286 that had a Qbasic interpreter among other things, and it came with a game where a gorilla throws a barrel at buildings. When I read the code, I was startled to learn how easy it was to understand - multiply this by that, draw these here if this happens, etc. Then I tried to write my own programs and kept getting errors. And nobody anywhere -- not my parents, nor schoolmates or teachers, faculty, clergy, or TV characters had any kind of problem like that. The lack of support was ultimately what discouraged me, I suppose.

And today's 9 year old can now hop in the internet and learn everything there is to know about programming. Ditto for making electronic music, robotics... I am so jealous of the opportunities kids have now.

Back in the Olde Dayes, if you weren't geographically close to a mentor, you were pooched. I had to chip away at all my knowledge bit by bit. My only consolation is that I learned the Hard Way, so I feel I have a more fundamental understanding and appreciation of the subject matter.

Going on the internet to fill out those old topics though... all the little pieces suddenly combine, the blockages removed... it all suddenly becomes clear, it's like having an extra sense or gaining 100 IQ points.

The main difference between then and now is that back then you stumbled upon it, and now you need to make a concerted effort to find out where to start.

It's like how car engines used to be completely exposed under the hood, now it's all hidden under plastic panels.

Yeah I guess our popular end user products are much more polished now and don't force you to get your hands dirty. I remember you couldn't even start a game without typing some cryptic code into the computer. So that extra push isn't there anymore and you can easily use all of this technology without ever learning anything. On the other hand, I think we now have much more information available and easily accessible for those who do choose to get involved.

Completely agree, and I think the problem I'm trying to solve is making sure every kid has the chance to find out whether they want to know more by showing them at a young age that it's actually an option that's open to them.

Agreed. I got access to a C64 when I was in primary school, and was absolutely wrapped in creating my own text-based adventure games, and extremely simple sprite-engine games. I also played Archon and Ghost & Goblins, but I wasn't put out that I couldn't create them.

It's true that modern games and apps set the bar high. But the stuff I produced on the C=64 when I was 14 was equally as basic when compared with the games of the time. It's not about making something as polished as what you can buy, it's about becoming fascinated with how something works, and learning about things at a deeper level through self-discovery.

The stories kids write and the pictures kids draw are primitive when compared to what they could buy, but they still like to spend time making them!

I am not an iOS developer, but my friends' two 11-year-olds have produced a few apps, without any formal training. Not polished, but they work. I don't have any other evidence that these two are extraordinary geniuses.

My impression is that iOS developer tools (and modern high-level tools generally) provide beginning developers with a much quicker path to producing highly visual applications than I had as beginning C programmer decades ago.

More visual feedback == more fun == more motivation to continue.

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