Thread

1. schmichael · 1790257005 · focus · HN ↗

   My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:

   Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.

   Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.

   He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.

   I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.

   If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.

   1. egeozcan · 1790257362 · focus · HN ↗

      Not to be taken too literally but, everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file. You don't need a server. Yes, many clipboard/camera/mic/etc. APIs and other sensitive stuff are restricted but it's great for starting.

      1. qsera · 1790318521 · focus · HN ↗

         >everything you could do with QBASIC, you can do with an HTML file

         Oh yea? give me the equalent of PLAY function. Or the PSET function to turn individual pixels on and off on the screen. Give me the function to read the color of any onscreen pixel (admittantly not QBASIC but some C variant)...

         FFS you can't even draw something delayed on screen without having to deal with the setTimeout, setInterval madness. That alone would kill any interest that a kid might be starting out with!

         1. qsera · 1790349806 · focus · HN ↗

            >Regarding your examples: PSET corresponds to `ctx.fillRect(x, y, 1, 1)` on a canvas, reading a pixel corresponds to `ctx.getImageData(x, y, 1, 1)`.

            What is a `ctx` and why do I need that? These are all hacks. Graphics programming in bolted on HTML in the form of canvas. It is a horrible platform for doing fun graphics programming when compared to qbasic.

            >For delays, you define "sleep" (one line) and write "await sleep(500)" inside a loop, just like with "SLEEP" in QBASIC.

            Kindly provide the code for this sleep function and tell me how a beginner who is trying draw some graphics on screen is supposed to figure that.

            1. egeozcan · 1790401605 · focus · HN ↗

               I think if you could figure out how QBASIC works, you can easily figure out how to draw in a canvas: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.devtoolsdaily.com&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;playground&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.devtoolsdaily.com&#x2F;canvas&#x2F;playground&#x2F;

               For sleep: const sleep = (ms) =&gt; new Promise(x =&gt; setTimeout(x, ms))

               then you use like, for(;;) { console.log(&quot;hello&quot;); await sleep(1000); }

               The extra you get with this is the awesome dev tools. You can try it in this very page.

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