> "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.
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.
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.
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.
thfuran · · focus · HN ↗
tptacek · · focus · HN ↗
I actually still don't know BASIC.
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.