> "But it booted straight into BASIC. That’s all it did. I was, like, 8 years old. I wasn’t about to learn BASIC. What I learned instead: computers were not as awesome as I’d imagined."
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
I think you were the exception. Most kids never even knew what BASIC was. If there was a game already on the computer, they'd be happy to play it. If they really liked the game they might learn how to start the game if it wasn't already running, but they didn't care about doing anything else. Kids who were into computers looked at a computer and saw endless possibility. Everybody else played sports outside, watched TV, or hung out with their friends.
It was probably a function of not just personality type but education. For whatever reason I was taught basic in elementary school as a millennial and it left an impression.
Education has to help demystify computers and give people an idea of what they could do with one. Basic seems like a weird choice for a millennial, but at least it had you actually write code instead of abstracting it away into pushing around icons like some of the systems I've seen for teaching young kids about software or even just giving directions to turtles.
Why is BASIC a weird choice? It wasn't really a choice at all. All the computers in my school ran it until I was 8 or 9 and the school board could afford to upgrade to Windows machines.
Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP. BASIC wouldn't have been included in XP or 2000, and depending on what exactly they were using, it may have been easier to use something with more features. QBasic for example wouldn't have syntax highlighting. Simple programs in languages like python or perl can be used to teach the same concepts, with fairly similar syntax, and would have been more applicable to software people were actually writing at the time.
I don't have much experience with Visual BASIC, but it seems like it was (and still is) a fairly effective and usable rapid development environment.
These days I'd rather program in F# or C# if I'm writing code to run on the CLR, but I remember it as pretty nice for making GUIs especially.
> Depending on where you draw the line for millennials the school computers could have been running anything from Windows 95 to Windows XP.
Weird. I distinctly remember Commodore 64, DOS, and Windows 3.1 at school. Kind of hard to use Windows 95 before 1995, but I am pretty sure I had a Windows 98 SE machine at home when my school finally got Windows 95.
If you define a millennial as someone born from 1982-1996, the majority of those kids by the time the had a computer lab (say by the time they were in middle school) would have been too old for BASIC. You are talking 92-06, Windows 95 took over the majority market share by the end of '96, and you are forgetting a whole lot of schools had Apples being pumped in, so a lot less access to BASIC. Unless you were in a programming adjacent class, the majority of millennials weren't learning basic. Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
> Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
You got a computer in that era because you thought you talked to them and they did what you asked them to do.
Then you got the computer and when it started up you got a flashing K. It was a bit of a disappointment. But you flicked open the hefty manual, started reading and before long you were hooked.
One career later, I now have a computer that is very, very close to what I wanted all those years ago but with a significant and irritating genie attitude to granting my wishes.
Yeah, I did that too. That's what you did with these machines. Deeply unsatisfying! Like: a real lesson in how gnarly real computers actually were. This is my point. You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything, but it turns out "anything" took on values ranging from "hours to many hours of typing in BASIC listings and then working through inscrutable errors until something showed up on the screen but then crashed". Computers sucked ass!
>You got one of these thingies and thought you could do anything..
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...
As near as I can remember, my first real programming experience was when I was eight years old, writing basic programs on an Apple IIc at school in 3rd grade. (I was too poor to afford my own computer until my senior year of college). It was awesome.
I have never found computers disappointing, and I have spent most of my career/life learning about them - from processor design through to distributed systems. Mostly I've been disappointed in the disparity between the number of interesting things I'd like to do, and the number of lifetimes I have available to me.
Figuring out inscrutable errors seems highly educational. I guess I don't have enough data to determine whether your bad experience was more or less common (probably less common on HN though). I imagine some (like yourself at 8) found computers frustrating and bad, while others (some peer posters on HN, who might also have been a bit older when they started) found them frustrating and good!
I did come to appreciate that. I was a professional C programmer for a lot of years! A hand tool woodworker, so to speak. It's great. But it's not the same as what I had thought computers were when I was a little kid.
Different strokes, I guess. FWIW, I also started at 8 -- with a Commodore 64 and a Commodore Vic-20, both connected to a television -- and I found the process of trail-and-error learning my way through BASIC to be absolutely awesome.
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
Haha! I did, but not for a few years, until I took up Pascal and MacOS and then wanted to find a way around the 32k text limit that was a stubbornly difficult problem to solve for a while (and was the original reason that BBEdit became so popular).
Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.
I learned that I really enjoy working on fine details, hyperspecializing, and doing deep dives into particular systems --- all the things you do to be a competent software security person --- but that end-to-end application construction, front-end to backend to operations --- is necessarily a multiple person project, unless it's like a crazy labor of love that you dedicate all your free time to.
Aside from the Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC (CP/M!), at various times a secondhand BBC Model B and then later the family PC, I wrote complex programs for a Sharp PC-1246 (because I had the cassette interface).
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.
But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
> Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now resent technology
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
I did the same thing writing sample code from DirectDraw APIs to make windows games. There was a huge gap between copying tutorials and writing my own game. I never got there. LLMs could bridge the divide. Tutorials can give me the nuts and bolts and feel of whats possible. LLMs can bring into reality the bigger ideas from my mind.
Sure they can. Of course they can. "Computers suck" is practically the motto of the entire field of software security. That doesn't mean they're not fun to work with! Just that they suck.
The kids who loved computers were the ones plugging in line after line of BASIC. Well, them and the ones who just really loved games. Games were a gateway drug for a lot of kids because for so long games could really make you work for it. Games had kids making changes to config.sys and setting BLASTER environment variables, connecting to a BBS or FTP sites for downloads, and troubleshooting network issues to get LAN games running with friends. You could get pretty good at computers just getting your fix. That took a pretty strong commitment though because if all you cared about were games, and if you had them, consoles made gaming very simple. Too simple if you valued the sense of learning and accomplishment that came from winning a wrestling match with an unforgiving computer keeping you from the game you wanted to play.
I was one of the kids who didn't have a computer at home but had friends with those, and would read the BASIC listings in the magazines many times over to figure exactly what they did and think about what I could change before I visited my friends and started typing it all on their computer.
I would like to point out that you were playing a bit of goal post moving.
>Most kids felt awe.
then
>which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The number of kids that had computers that typed in BASIC programs was absolutely tiny, unless they were doing it as part of a school as a grade. The number of kids at home that had computers in around 93 was less than 1/5th of all households and those tended to be the most wealthy. Even then they were so expensive most parents were telling them to stay away and not letting them edit random files.
In that area, kids with computers that booted straight to basic like the spectrum, bbc micro, c64 etc fell into two camps -- those who were interested, and those whose parents were interested. I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.
Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.
Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.
> I suspect the former were more numerous, as to have a parent interested enough to spend a fortune on a computer without the pester power of the kid feels quite niche.
Having been one of the interested kids (but it took quite a while before any real program design or analysis clicked for me) my experience was that most of the others didn't seem all that interested (and were really just there to play games).
Probably for quite a while kids were more likely to have a console than access to an actual computer. But if you had a computer it was not like you could rely on having someone else around to start up the game for you. In fact there was a good chance that your access to a computer was arranged by adults who specifically expected you to learn how to use it.
We surely did, in those days you couldn't get computer games when you felt like, even pirated ones.
You either endless played the fews that you had, or eventually got to learn BASIC, and the more curious ones could even got one of those machine language books from the local library.
I ended up a systems programmer in this doomed industry. BASIC on a Z80 didn't get me there (exploits on a DG/UX at a library system did.) Different people, different vectors.
I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
There's nothing to be excited for. Even if AI works as well as people say (and to be clear: it very much doesn't), that future sucks ass. No more fun making things, no fun solving problems, just hand it off to the machine that does things for you. That's an awful future where every shred of joy is gone from computing.
It might genuinely suck for you. It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can. And there's more of them than you.
I think that it should not need to be mutually exclusive. You can make it you can enter the programs yourself (if you prefer to do for whatever reason, including, it does not work well (like you mention), or because of Dijkstra objection or other objections to the use of AI for programming the computer or AI in general), but that AI can also be possible.
> It's amazing for people who couldn't build anything before, but now can.
(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.
Yes. I have a really hard time getting past the sheer scale of enablement for normal people, and we're stacking it up against, what, the joy professional developers get out of hand-cutting dovetail keys? And then like a whole cinematic universe about how if all the joinery isn't hand-cut, everything's going to collapse, which, like, obviously no.
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
It sucks that most of those people are going to be entirely dependent on a proprietary service to build things for them and they will never actually bother learning or improving their skills, even though the tools to do so have never been more freely and widely available.
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
>I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems. To me this is like how the HAM radio people used to be required to learn Morse code.
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
Sure, lots of things are more important than "the hacker ethos". Like critical thinking and independent thought, self-reliance, the joy of actually creating something yourself (which AI is a hollow, artificial substitute for).
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
I think you just wrote "lots of things are more important than the hacker ethos, like [axiomatic rederivation of the hacker ethos]". That's not a persuasive argument.
I think it's just easy to dismiss "the hacker ethos" without considering the qualities it actually consists of. Maybe you'd disagree, but I think those qualities are very important and worth protecting.
I'm not saying it's not important, just that you can't reasonably expect to orient all of society around it. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about how computing is going to work for ordinary people.
I'm not expecting to orient all of society around it, but I do believe that it's harmful to remove or replace it where it does exist.
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
When you suggest that ordinary people should not use personal applications that they've built with AI because it robs them of the hacker spirit, that's what you're doing: orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference.
The point is that this should not be a good place to sell us a vision incompatible with that ethos.
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
I am dismissive of that point of view, and I'm a "hacker". Not everybody here agrees on everything. I feel like I'm... pretty in tune with HN. Like, I think I could present concrete evidence on that claim.
>We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizarre that you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
If I tell you to build me a house and you do so, I have not built the house.
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
I have no idea what this analogy is meant to communicate. If you're trying to suggest that software construction is only intentional or attributable if you write source code by hand, I'll just come back and say you haven't legitimately build anything unless you hex-edited it in machine code.
It's meant to communicate that building is something that requires effort on the part of the builder.
I don't write assembly, but I still had to learn how to code. I had to practice and put in the effort to develop it as a skill. Then, when I write something, I have to put in the effort to do it.
Of course, building things with AI generally takes varying levels of domain knowledge and guiding for now, but if we're talking about ordinary users making their own software, the implication is that in some cases existing skill won't be necessary, if not now then eventually.
At that point it would be truly effortless, and I don't think that you can rightfully say you built something if it required zero effort on your part.
It is not good to make things ordinary people use hard just for the sake of making it hard, or even in the pursuit of a perceived quality threshold if that threshold is beyond what the users will perceive. The cart is extremely dragging the horse in our field.
Is it? I mean I can always run to home depot and cobble something together based on books, youtube, and AI guidance, but I know when I need a professional.
I don't think any trade was ever harmed by the existence of hardware stores. Much the same, AI is not harming dev work. It's filling gaps where no product could exist before.
Big tech does not like DIY unless they control it and that's the actual story, not attacking devs and telling them they're obsolete. Why do you insist on avoiding that story and coming back here to argue with devs?
Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?
For me, I made things because I liked the process of making things, it was never really about the result. Much like solving crossword puzzles is about the process itself, not about getting the answer.
You are completely right. I am not entitled to anything. But before I was paid to have fun, I spent years trying to get better at it and then suddenly it completely lost its value. From fun of solving crossword puzzles to the dread of validating if crossword puzzles bot solved crossword puzzle correctly, with worse pay, less job security or opportunities.
I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.
I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
> I have never been able to understand this perspective. It's come up so often that it almost feels like a pro-AI propaganda strawman in the style of the "virgin vs chad" meme.
The "strawman" comes from the businesses promoting the frontier LLMs and many of the best-known influencers in the space, especially on Xitter.
I'm not even that old, but totally agree with this sentiment. Going to miss those times. It's amazing being able to build whatever you want now, but it's bittersweet because if you truly wanted to learn how to do it, you could do it yourself.
I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
Me too! Though I never learned how to use functions (subroutines) until I picked up C from a book later on. I still have dozens of programs I wrote back in the day in qbasic, largely based off the examples in the help system.
Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
Your priors are all out of whack. Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8. Programming is much more accessible now than then, but the overwhelming majority of people still don’t know any JavaScript or python or anything else.
I had Turbo C as a young teenager, but really learned C at the csh prompt of a terminal connected to a giant DG/UX computer in my first summer job.
Unix/Linux historically gave gave you a shell prompt (allowing you to type in shell programs) after login and a C compiler in the box. Modern Ubuntu or macOS technically still have terminal apps and shell prompts, but usually boot into a desktop GUI.
I was already coding C and C++ at the age of 16, having learnt Timex BASIC, Z80 and 6800, Turbo BASIC, GW-BASIC, Turbo Pascal, in the previous six years, starting with Timex BASIC at the age of 10.
It helped the books I got with my Timex 2068, the local library, the computer magazines with listings like the British Input ones, and our school computer labs with MS-DOS. 3.3.
Programming (by humans) is less accessible in 2026 because most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment and they don't include a user-friendly programming instruction manual (graphing calculators may be an exception however). And before the era of "there's an app for that" it was assumed that users would need to write their own programs, so systems were designed to support that. Vibe programming (by LLMs) is more accessible now however.
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
>most personal computing devices don't boot into a programming environment
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
All true, but the onramp isn't included in the box. When you get a smartphone, how do you know that you could even program it? Is there any encouragement to do so vs. just buying apps? They are more like game consoles, in more ways than one.
As I mentioned, I think graphing calculators might be an exception.
In the mid 80s, something like 10% of US households had any computer at all. That the onramp is in the box doesn't really matter to the people who never saw the box.
I guess the question is how you measure accessibility - per device, or across the population as a whole? In 2026 several billion people have personal computing devices, but the devices no longer provide that programming onramp. Interestingly enough, it looks like ~25% of the world's population is still offline.
Have you ever been diagnosed with ADD or autism? I don't expect you to answer back on that. People that have these characteristics tend to cluster in fields like tech. This means without any prior knowledge you self filtered to a set of actions you didn't know you had a much higher attraction to than a random sample of the population.
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
> mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. As I understand it, it became part of the required first-year math curriculum, meaning basically (pun intended) every student learned how to write simple programs in BASIC.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it shows that BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math in the 1960s. Over the subsequent decades it turned out that a lot of elementary school students could learn it as well.
> Most people never learned BASIC, let alone at 8.
I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.
You were the exception too. A PC was one of the most expensive items in my house when we bought it. The computer table it sat on was the second most. I was so afraid of doing anything on it that'd break it. Heck I freaked out one time when I shut it down from the power button directly.
My Acorn BBC Model B booted straight into BBC BASIC as well, and I too thought it was awesome and taught myself BASIC straight away, and then 6502 assembler and latterly BCPL and so on. I was even younger than OP.
But I think we were the exception, even if we didn’t realise it at the time. In hindsight, my interest was most definitely not shared by my peers.
I remember getting magazines with basic games, where the full syntax was printed out. I would type it in and save to floppies on my Apple 2e - which my mother purchased second hand.
I refuse the accusation - I had a very good idea what BASIC was even at 5 years old. QBASIC was the program that allowed you to open GORILLA.BAS and play the Gorilla fruit throwing game.
..at that time I have to admit, most of what I saw there went over my head. I understood the concept of program code, but had very little idea of what was going on, but wanted to learn. Eventually I started modifying the code, and started making my own stuff, driven mostly by determination rather than any understanding of what was going on.
Reading through all the comments, I think there’s also a bit of a generational gap here.
There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.
I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:
Returns the current graphics cursor coordinates or the color attribute of a specified pixel.
'This example requires a color graphics adapter.
SCREEN 1
LINE (0, 0)-(100, 100), 2
LOCATE 14, 1
FOR y% = 1 TO 10
FOR x% = 1 TO 10
PRINT POINT(x%, y%);
NEXT x%
PRINT
NEXT y%
If I remember correctly QBasic even allowed configuring and controlling serial/parallel ports. Just imagine what a guy could do with that if he was bold enough to poke wires into a parallel port....
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
Absolutely~ I remember many summer days as a kid trying to figure out how to send commands to our serial-port driven 2400 baud modem using the AT command set:
OPEN "COM1:2400,N,8,1,BIN" FOR OUTPUT AS #1
Followed by my parents yelling at me to get off the phone since we only had the one landline. :)
I think the true generational divide was between DOS and Windows. After spending an inordinate amount of time in DOS (making the journey to Borland C), it felt awesome that you could draw onto the screen, no questions asked. I made so many games and graphical programs just drawing to the screen and then reading the input in a loop, it worked great.
Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.
Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.
And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).
As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
> As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
Screen mode 13h was definitely fantastic. Being able to light up a pixel by mapping directly to the 64k contiguous bytes in the address space was very intuitive.
And yeah dealing with Win32 stuff definitely came with its own set of complexities, I practically had the Charles Petzold Programming Windows book memorized back in the day.
But let’s also not forget Visual Basic, which outside of maybe Delphi, I'd consider one of the greatest RAD environments ever created. Being able to just grab a button onto a form and then double-click it which would instantly create a handler that you could add your logic to was very approachable even for younger audiences.
The only problem of course is that Visual Basic wasn’t bundled with Windows, so it was a lot less accessible than QBasic which came bundled for free with MS DOS 5.0.
I think you’re half right. To echo the other comments, I think 8 is too young for most kids to get into BASIC. I learnt programming on BASIC but I was 12 or so and had a teacher and hence structured guidance. I don’t know that I had the mental capacity to self-teach that kind of programming even at 12, let alone 8!
But 8 is not too early to learn programming as such, because my kids started around that age. Only they started creating dumb games using Scratch in a modern browser on a full-fledged modern OS. The environment you start with probably matters a lot for how much you take to it.
I was really surprised by the article, I assumed it was going to be the same as my experience which was amazement at having the ability to write instructions that caused the system to do stuff, like make dumb games initially in basic and then better games in assembly.
meredithbloom · · focus · HN ↗
You were the exception. Most kids felt awe. We started learning BASIC and creating "dumb games". That's the origin story of most people my age who ended up in this doomed industry.
chr15m · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
popalchemist · · focus · HN ↗
milesvp · · focus · HN ↗
20 goto 10
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS · · focus · HN ↗
20 goto 10
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
wild_egg · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
isityettime · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
isityettime · · focus · HN ↗
wild_egg · · focus · HN ↗
Weird. I distinctly remember Commodore 64, DOS, and Windows 3.1 at school. Kind of hard to use Windows 95 before 1995, but I am pretty sure I had a Windows 98 SE machine at home when my school finally got Windows 95.
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗
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zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
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mitxela · · focus · HN ↗
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tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
neilwilson · · focus · HN ↗
Then you got the computer and when it started up you got a flashing K. It was a bit of a disappointment. But you flicked open the hefty manual, started reading and before long you were hooked.
One career later, I now have a computer that is very, very close to what I wanted all those years ago but with a significant and irritating genie attitude to granting my wishes.
Now if we can just tone down the genie stuff…
flomo · · focus · HN ↗
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musicale · · focus · HN ↗
Yet magazines and books commonly published program listings for games in BASIC which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
Until like a year ago.
qsera · · focus · HN ↗
Why did you think that? Did you see people use it like that? anything? really?
For me, computers became intriguing after I started programming in BASIC. Not before that. Before that I was just curious about what the big deal about these things are...
In the literature, there would be passages that describe how computer followed "instructions", but I never could make sense of that or understood what an "instruction" was. So it didn't really sway me either way. I just tried hard and remained curious to understand what this "instruction" was and how I could give it to computers...
May be your falling the same way for LLMs now..
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
foobazgt · · focus · HN ↗
I have never found computers disappointing, and I have spent most of my career/life learning about them - from processor design through to distributed systems. Mostly I've been disappointed in the disparity between the number of interesting things I'd like to do, and the number of lifetimes I have available to me.
Different strokes for different folks, I guess.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
thaumaturgy · · focus · HN ↗
I would start with a completely blank slate and then, gradually, be able to create something out of nothing. If I was clever enough, it could do whatever I wanted (as long as my wants were modest). It was magical and I have nothing but fond memories of the time I spent doing that.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
thaumaturgy · · focus · HN ↗
Trying to correctly render a vertical blinking cursor on top of proportional fonts took me ages to get right...ish.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
dofm · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/" rel="nofollow">https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1421/sharp-pc-1246/
This was the very opposite of unsatisfying. I don’t recognise this idea that computers sucked.
AI-assisted coding is, to me, way more soul-destroying than hitting the limits of a simple home computer. In most regards I feel like I have reached the end of my interest in computing, and the pivot I had in mind — teaching - looks like it has been joy-deadened too. Nobody is going to want to learn how anything that is not AI actually works, tech people insist that AI will replace (they say augment, they mean replace) teachers and trainers, politicians seem to be listening, and non-tech people now increasingly resent technology.
I barely recognise the industry I spent my life in; I do not recognise the evident enthusiasm for a world that is abandoning a whole, transformative pedagogy in favour of the programming equivalent of games consoles: button pushing vibes.
I am not at all of the opinion that AI has no value, though it does not have anywhere close to the value people insist it must have for me. I am learning, trying to find an ethical angle on it that doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable and exhausted by the hype.
But it is the final nail in the coffin of the joy of tech work for me, and as a single middle-aged man I perceive this as life changing and very likely life-shortening, in the way that psychologically unhealthy things are a health risk for older adults: unless I find something that gives my work life a sense of connected purpose again, I figure I will be gone before the Spectrum makes it to fifty.
So yeah, no. No.
lolakutty · · focus · HN ↗
Same here. I can understand indifference, but this I don't get.
FFS I even loved playing with calculators!
Flere-Imsaho · · focus · HN ↗
I disagree with most of your post, but this one the most.
Non-tech people already resent technology... Try and sit next to a non tech person use a desktop pc. It wasn't until the smart phone that the average person started to use technology like you or I recognise. And that's only because it's been simplified to the extreme for them. (I don't blame them btw).
AI is such a step change for learning and teaching... For anyone who is inquisitive. Ask it endless questions, explore ideas, get it to generate images to help you...
someothherguyy · · focus · HN ↗
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zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
They can't have sucked that much if you saw fit to build a career around them.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
autoexec · · focus · HN ↗
meredithbloom · · focus · HN ↗
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pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
>Most kids felt awe.
then
>which many kids somehow managed to type in and run.
The number of kids that had computers that typed in BASIC programs was absolutely tiny, unless they were doing it as part of a school as a grade. The number of kids at home that had computers in around 93 was less than 1/5th of all households and those tended to be the most wealthy. Even then they were so expensive most parents were telling them to stay away and not letting them edit random files.
iso1631 · · focus · HN ↗
The vast majority of kids never touched computers, other than maybe running logo at school to move a turtle around.
Most kids who were only interested in a game had a NES or Sega console.
Of the former group, the awe began when you wrote in the example program from the manual or magazine, made it do something, and then changed it. Even something as simple as changing from 3 lives to 99.
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Having been one of the interested kids (but it took quite a while before any real program design or analysis clicked for me) my experience was that most of the others didn't seem all that interested (and were really just there to play games).
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
You either endless played the fews that you had, or eventually got to learn BASIC, and the more curious ones could even got one of those machine language books from the local library.
gharman · · focus · HN ↗
“Mom, I’m bored will you buy this a new computer game?” “Lol no! Go outside.” “Well crap. I guess I’ll have to write my own game.”
theholygrail · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
linkregister · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
drfloyd51 · · focus · HN ↗
I hope this makes you feel better: all industries are doomed. But few rise and fall in one lifetime.
DASD · · focus · HN ↗
senderista · · focus · HN ↗
sublinear · · focus · HN ↗
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Adopters feel the future is brighter than ever.
Article author is excited. I am too.
sublinear · · focus · HN ↗
I feel like the future is bright precisely because AI sucks so bad while also lowering the bar.
It made people not take software and software engineers for granted. Public perception of software has also finally matured. Boomers and tech CEOs fell into a tarpit that harshly exposes their stupidity while laypeople now feel like they can change the system.
This is all exciting in the best ways. My usage of AI at work and for personal projects goes as far as whatever the AI summary is on google. That's more than enough for me to get enough of a productivity boost on par with those who embarrassingly thrust themselves balls deep and refuse to pull out. Not everyone has to push the "I'm feeling lucky" button to get the same work done at the same pace.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
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tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
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dctoedt · · focus · HN ↗
(Raises hand.) I'm doing things with my online law-school course materials, in just a few minutes using Claude, that I never even considered doing before because I didn't want to take the time to improve my rudimentary JavaScript- and CSS skills. Instead of just a fairly-simple, single-page HTML document, Claude is helping me turn the materials into something genuinely useful for both my students and practitioners.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
One of my favorite journalists is Jerusalem Demsas, who just on a podcast mentioned --- in passing --- that she'd vibe-coded the photo editor they were using for her publication. That's a bananas statement! And we're all just, shrug, or worse: "that's slop!"
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll print money hats off this sentiment. By all means, do whatever you can to leave the lane we're building in as open and stigmatized as possible!
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
It also sucks that so many people in tech think that the widespread loss of education, knowledge and freedom is a good thing.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
I get that it might suck for people like us, who took the time to learn those languages! Oh well.
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
No one is saying that anyone has to, but being able to is the whole thesis of the hacker ethos. Knowing how to do things yourself versus being a consumer dependent on corporations.
And children are learning how to program nowadays... although that won't be the case for long. My nephew is taking programming classes in school and making games in Roblox. But soon the only thing they'll teach is how to prompt Claude. We were almost at a point where programming could become general knowledge and that might have enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism. Now we're burning it all down and a depressing number of people like yourself on this erstwhile forum of programmers and hackers are actually dancing on the ashes.
Using a service to generate software for you is not "building programs to solve your problems." You aren't building anything, and you certainly aren't learning anything that would give you any real control over it or let you exercise freedom relative to it. AI is just proprietary software and data theft with more steps and a lot more fascism.
It doesn't just suck for us, it sucks for everyone.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
Why shouldn't one lament sacrificing individuality and creativity, and increasing our reliance on corporations, all for the sake of convenience?
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
Ease and convenience are not worth the cost of giving up bits and pieces of our humanity here and there until there's nothing left; Pre-AI computing has already taken enough of it.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
> I do not think it's a good thing for normal people to have to learn programming languages to built programs to solve their problems.
Is this not also "orienting all of society around your aesthetic preference"?
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
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zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
Some of us actually like making things, especially including the design step. Some of us were eight years old with access to a computer that booted into BASIC, and wanted to reckon with that, and eventually learn the missing steps towards a real project. Some of us take a joy in seeing someone else use our creations, greater than any hardship that was involved. Some of us value the idea that we won't have to start from scratch next time, on principle, even if it would be trivial to start from scratch anyway.
And some of us see that no, high level language to English is fundamentally not the same kind of step as low level language to high level language.
Statements like
> It could well be devastating for "the hacker ethos". You can lament that all you want. But there are more important things than "the hacker ethos".
come across as dismissive of, and not empathetic to, that point of view.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
famouswaffles · · focus · HN ↗
Lol. Not only was this not true but we weren't even close. Genuinely bizarre that you could think this.
>enabled widespread freedom and control over the evils of proprietary software and commercialism.
Ironically, the only reality where this is remotely feasible is one where frontier llms can be run locally on phone like hardware and it becomes popular to do so.
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
I can give you requirements, give you feedback during the process, and otherwise contribute to the design, but at the end of the day I did not build the house.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
ejj28 · · focus · HN ↗
I don't write assembly, but I still had to learn how to code. I had to practice and put in the effort to develop it as a skill. Then, when I write something, I have to put in the effort to do it.
Of course, building things with AI generally takes varying levels of domain knowledge and guiding for now, but if we're talking about ordinary users making their own software, the implication is that in some cases existing skill won't be necessary, if not now then eventually.
At that point it would be truly effortless, and I don't think that you can rightfully say you built something if it required zero effort on your part.
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
sublinear · · focus · HN ↗
I don't think any trade was ever harmed by the existence of hardware stores. Much the same, AI is not harming dev work. It's filling gaps where no product could exist before.
Big tech does not like DIY unless they control it and that's the actual story, not attacking devs and telling them they're obsolete. Why do you insist on avoiding that story and coming back here to argue with devs?
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Are you telling us the only reason why making things was fun is because it made you "special"? And now that anyone can do it it isn't worth it for you anymore?
That's the wrong reason to do something.
garretraziel · · focus · HN ↗
echelon · · focus · HN ↗
Unless you're complaining you can't be paid to do it the old way. But none of us were paid to have fun, we were paid to deliver results.
garretraziel · · focus · HN ↗
I am not entitled for things to continue as they were, but I can still feel sad about it, you know.
sublinear · · focus · HN ↗
You can and should still write most of the code yourself and use AI to assist when you get stuck. Apart from saving yourself some hours because you no longer hit dead ends on google, I don't understand how that's meaningfully different from using a search engine and finding solutions on StackOverflow and GitHub. I don't even understand how people think this traditional workflow I'm suggesting is any slower than reviewing LLM output either. It takes the same cognitive load and the same time in the end. The only people who believe they can go faster and reduce cognitive load aren't just inexperienced, but also seem to have ADHD or something. Like they just wanna bask in the vibes of the machine-generated text scrolling by.
If your goal is to make something you're going to live with and maintain long term, or is more generally the foundation of a bigger idea, you can't ignore any part of the code or delegate it away. It's still writing that you're bound by like any other document.
zahlman · · focus · HN ↗
The "strawman" comes from the businesses promoting the frontier LLMs and many of the best-known influencers in the space, especially on Xitter.
wglb · · focus · HN ↗
cco · · focus · HN ↗
tribby · · focus · HN ↗
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saadn92 · · focus · HN ↗
AbsurdCensor · · focus · HN ↗
qsera · · focus · HN ↗
QBasic's bultin help/documentation was good enough for me..
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
qsera · · focus · HN ↗
If I remember correctly, there were even sample programs included in this documentation.
vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
For example GET/PUT had this one:
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
saadn92 · · focus · HN ↗
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
I actually still don't know BASIC.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
It helped the books I got with my Timex 2068, the local library, the computer magazines with listings like the British Input ones, and our school computer labs with MS-DOS. 3.3.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
BASIC was designed as a simplified, interactive version of FORTRAN that non-experts could learn in an afternoon, but which was still powerful enough for a wide range of applications including numerical methods, simulations, data processing, and games. It was also small enough to implement effectively on a timeshared minicomputer or an 8-bit microcomputer.
Even though the Mac was GUI-based, for a time it shipped with, and promoted, HyperCard, which led to a brief explosion of user-created programs developed as HyperCard stacks.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
Yes, but now everyone and their mum has a personal computing device, and there's tutorials readily accessible, and five seconds of googling can bring you to an online programming environment.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
As I mentioned, I think graphing calculators might be an exception.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
josephg · · focus · HN ↗
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
pixl97 · · focus · HN ↗
In addition this also increases the probability that your unaware of others peoples drives, likes, and abilities, which can easily mislead you to believe that a large portion of the is skilled like you in the same way and wants to conquer information.
musicale · · focus · HN ↗
It's worth considering that BASIC was invented to teach programming to incoming college students, most of whom had never used computers before, and most of whom would major in the humanities or social sciences. As I understand it, it became part of the required first-year math curriculum, meaning basically (pun intended) every student learned how to write simple programs in BASIC.
You are correct in the sense that it was originally Ivy League students (and some local high school students), a highly select group, but it shows that BASIC wasn't harder than first-year college math in the 1960s. Over the subsequent decades it turned out that a lot of elementary school students could learn it as well.
ninjalanternshk · · focus · HN ↗
My Apple //e came with one language, BASIC, it was built in, nothing to buy, and came with a book on how to get started writing it.
But yeah I didn’t start at 8.
We didn’t get that Apple until I was 10, so that’s then I started.
hodgesrm · · focus · HN ↗
I learned it at age 12. It was pretty much as the author described, except in my case the "computer" was a Texas Instruments teletype, a phone, and a 300 baud modem. Plus a booklet with reddish cover introducing the BASIC language and how to connect to our school account at Washtenaw Computing Services. That was the beginning of a life-long journey with computers.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
piloto_ciego · · focus · HN ↗
Please.
wetwater · · focus · HN ↗
jcelerier · · focus · HN ↗
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
I guess that means you are still interested in pretty much everything
inopinatus · · focus · HN ↗
But I think we were the exception, even if we didn’t realise it at the time. In hindsight, my interest was most definitely not shared by my peers.
jeremycarter · · focus · HN ↗
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
..at that time I have to admit, most of what I saw there went over my head. I understood the concept of program code, but had very little idea of what was going on, but wanted to learn. Eventually I started modifying the code, and started making my own stuff, driven mostly by determination rather than any understanding of what was going on.
vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
There’s a huge difference between a kid turning on a Commodore 64 or an Apple II and being dropped into the relatively no-frills versions the BASIC interpreter versus a kid in the early ’90s who had a DOS machine with MS-DOS 5 bundled with QBasic which IMHO is a more representative example of a “batteries included” BASIC environment that was significantly more user-friendly.
I also encountered QBASIC as an elementary school kid - it felt like the closest thing to sorcery. People who grew up in the age of the internet really underestimate how awesome it was to be able to just be able to place the cursor on a more obscure command (like PEEK/POKE or POINT) and see something like this:
qsera · · focus · HN ↗
Today, computers don't even have parallal/serial ports. Everyone has to pay the USB gods their tribute to have the mercy of allowing to program arbitrary IO from their computers....And they still need some kind of serial receptacle on the other end...
vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
torginus · · focus · HN ↗
Then I transitioned to Windows, and had to contend with all the complexity.. What's a Window Class and how do you write an event loop to respond to window messages, why is this all so complex.. Why is MFC somehow not really better.
Having written a simple DOS GUI (that kinda looked like Windows), I had to discover that a Windows app of equivalent functionality took more and messier code.
And forget drawing to the screen, you had to grapple with GDI drawing contexts, it was slow and bad.. (Not like Linux was any better than this regard).
As for DOS, I have had the privilege of hacking together a bitbanging VGA adapter, so I know for a fact that drawing to the screen is really as simple as setting values in an array, then, scanning it out to the display.
vunderba · · focus · HN ↗
Screen mode 13h was definitely fantastic. Being able to light up a pixel by mapping directly to the 64k contiguous bytes in the address space was very intuitive.
And yeah dealing with Win32 stuff definitely came with its own set of complexities, I practically had the Charles Petzold Programming Windows book memorized back in the day.
But let’s also not forget Visual Basic, which outside of maybe Delphi, I'd consider one of the greatest RAD environments ever created. Being able to just grab a button onto a form and then double-click it which would instantly create a handler that you could add your logic to was very approachable even for younger audiences.
The only problem of course is that Visual Basic wasn’t bundled with Windows, so it was a lot less accessible than QBasic which came bundled for free with MS DOS 5.0.
keeda · · focus · HN ↗
But 8 is not too early to learn programming as such, because my kids started around that age. Only they started creating dumb games using Scratch in a modern browser on a full-fledged modern OS. The environment you start with probably matters a lot for how much you take to it.
RaftPeople · · focus · HN ↗
I was really surprised by the article, I assumed it was going to be the same as my experience which was amazement at having the ability to write instructions that caused the system to do stuff, like make dumb games initially in basic and then better games in assembly.
rom16384 · · focus · HN ↗
Some kids thought it was awesome to make the computer do stuff and learned how to program.