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Hey I hear you. When I started coding I was 9 and I did something like that in BASIC. It was awesome. I was actually considering what to start out with and I just went for iOS off the bat to see what happens. I also think kids these days pick up stuff way faster than 20-30 years ago. It's insane how fast they pick up things like touch interfaces, smartphones, tablets, etc for example.

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Same here. I have a one year old now, and was just thinking how sad it is that there isn't an equivalent of a C-64 any more. Turn it on, bam, a BASIC REPL in less than a second. Give the kid the language manual (all of 10-20 pages) and off they go.

Today, there is all this cruft they have to be shown (Cmd-R, XCode, etc.). If they screw up they can't just reboot.

There are benefits of course. Knocking out the power cord doesn't destroy the work in progress. There are non-volatile media. Screens have colors :-)

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