I found this really interesting, thank you for talking about it! I think part of my response is that the beginning of the story is very similar to my experience of programming in the 80s. We were a BBC Micro family, so I learned BASIC on that, and it was something I found incredibly satisfying, being able to type words and make the computer do what I wanted. A lot of script kiddie stuff where I figured out which bits of code I could alter to personalize programs while keeping the underlying functionality the same, but then I was a literal kid, most of this happened when I was under 10. And I do remember some bits of finding ways to work round the limitations of the language and the hardware. A friend of my dad's helped me to write something to expand the range of colours available beyond the seven in Mode 2 and only four possible in modes where you had any sort of access to reasonable graphics; discovering how to make things orange by combining red with yellow is one of my favourite memories of that stage in my life.
Then we ended up with early Apple Macs (cast offs from Dad's work), which were all GUI and didn't have an obvious way to get into programming, and I was out of the habit by the time I encountered early PCs. By the time I was 12 I was attending a stupid school where we were strongly discouraged from building up skills with computers, because nobody understood the difference between programming and IT, and even worse thought that having IT skills was a bad idea because it would mean people would assume we were only good enough for low level admin jobs. So I never got to the point of building on those early skills of digging around in BBC BASIC, and I really very much regret that. Though hmw26 came through the same school system with me and she's ended up quite a big name in both Open Source and commercial and academic computer science, so I can't completely blame my school.
So anyway, if you're still looking for prompts, can you talk about whether you're planning to teach your children programming, and if so how? I mean, I guess if the answer is no that might not be a very interesting post, but I would still be interested in why not!
no subject
Then we ended up with early Apple Macs (cast offs from Dad's work), which were all GUI and didn't have an obvious way to get into programming, and I was out of the habit by the time I encountered early PCs. By the time I was 12 I was attending a stupid school where we were strongly discouraged from building up skills with computers, because nobody understood the difference between programming and IT, and even worse thought that having IT skills was a bad idea because it would mean people would assume we were only good enough for low level admin jobs. So I never got to the point of building on those early skills of digging around in BBC BASIC, and I really very much regret that. Though
So anyway, if you're still looking for prompts, can you talk about whether you're planning to teach your children programming, and if so how? I mean, I guess if the answer is no that might not be a very interesting post, but I would still be interested in why not!