
80's kids started programming at an earlier age than today's millennials - javinpaul
https://thenextweb.com/dd/2018/01/23/report-80s-kids-started-programming-at-an-earlier-age-than-todays-millennials/
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jcadam
I was an 80s kid (born in 1980, in fact). I started programming in BASIC on
the family Apple ][e sometime between kindergarten and 2nd grade, I can't
remember anymore now. My mother is a software engineer (who started
programming in college, on punch cards) and had to suffer through me
constantly badgering her for help early on :)

The Apple ][e became an Amiga and I moved on to AMOS, then a 486 when I
finally switched over to hacking around in "real" languages like C and Pascal
on DOS, windows, and eventually Linux. Then came college (I knew I was going
to major in Computer Science since... always).

My resume shows a little more than 10 years of 'professional' programming
experience, which is all anyone cares about, but when you hire an 80s kid like
me, you're getting a lot more experience than you imagine.

Yea, yea, a lot of the early stuff was undisciplined hacking and flailing
without the proper theoretical grounding of a CS education. But I say it still
counts for something :)

~~~
ams6110
I started in the late 1970s at age 11-ish, on a TRS-80 Model I.

One of the local high schools bought a classroom of them and offered "Computer
Math" as an evening extra-curricular for younger kids.

The difference then was that access to computers was something new and
exciting. Today's kids grow up with computers from almost birth. They are
commonplace items and don't strike up as much interest or curiosity.

~~~
jcadam
I remember the facility my mother worked at had a family-day and I went on a
tour, and got to see an actually operating Cray-2 (with the coolant
waterfall). It was mesmerizing.

So much cooler than rows of cabinets full of rack-mount equipment in a modern
data center :)

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mpweiher
We really need to find a way to restore the "home computer": You turn it on,
there is a BASIC prompt.

(Of course we can't restore it 1:1, but that quality is so valuable)

UPDATE: I was probably a bit, er, terse. I am really about restoring that
_quality_ , and yes, the world has moved on and is in many ways better, so we
absolutely cannot "go back", and yes, it is absolutely not a trivial problem.
In fact, I'd say it is very, very hard. But so worthwhile.

Components are: open source; languages, particularly for UI programming that
make "open source" meaningful (giving people the ability to tinker);
development/customization interfaces on devices (shame on you, Apple...and
almost everyone else), languages and libraries/frameworks that collapse our
incredible complexity stack for the many simple things we want to do, etc.

~~~
maxxxxx
I don't think we can go back. It's like cars. The first cars were sold with
the understanding that they needed a lot of maintenance by the buyers.
Naturally car drivers got to understand their cars because it was necessary.
Now you can drive a car without having a clue how it works. Same with
computers. In the 80s it was assumed that would fiddle with your computer all
the time. Now you can get a device and just use it.

~~~
rypskar
I have problem with understanding the mindset of people that don't want to
learn how the car work or how the computer work. But that is probably because
for me it is easier to understand how something mechanical or electric work
than to understand how people work..

~~~
freehunter
There is something, likely many things, in your life that you don't understand
the details of, something that an expert in that subject may chastise you for
not knowing. Something that you take for granted that it just works, and never
stop to think about the logistics.

And that's fine. You have your specialty, they have theirs. And when you need
help with it, you don't need to be an expert in the subject because you can
hire one for a short period of time.

I'll be honest, I don't know how my furnace works. It just does. And when it
doesn't, I call an expert to fix it. Because that's gas and fire and a whole
lot of pipes and there's an air conditioner somewhere in the mix and I think
that's a humidifier attached? Doesn't matter, I have more important things to
think about and I don't want to break it even more (or worse, blow up my
house). I'll let the expert handle it.

~~~
rypskar
Sure there are lots of stuff I don't know, but I do want to learn at least the
basics about them. Not even saying I think it is something wrong with people
that don't think like that, only that they in that way are different.
Different is good and is what bring progress. I hire people for doing stuff
like electricity and doing service on my daily driver, not because I don't
know how to do it but so I can use my time on other things. But to me going
out to the garage and work on an old car is therapy, it is relaxing and take
my mind off everything else

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justherefortart
I wanted to be a business man as a kid (See pet Businessman Kids in the Hall).
I would look at the source for every program Apple provided in an attempt to
help me to learn how to build programs (the few that were in basic vs hex).

I started programming at roughly 7 in 1980 by sneaking away to get on the
Apple ][ computers the school had. My own 5.25" disk was like a gateway into
another dimension.

I've done several speeches on career days at my local elementary, middle and
high schools. Kids have no interest in learning how computers work anymore in
my experience. I always offer them full lists of resources and offer free
mentoring. Have never had a kid follow up in 20+ years of doing this. Which I
would have killed for that opportunity as a child.

I think partly it's when I describe the job of being a game programmer though.
It's work, what they want to be is a game designer, which is really just a
game player. And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I just wonder
where all the curious kids went.

~~~
ryandrake
Job security for us software pros. One day, 20 years from now, there will be
an _actual_ shortage of engineers, not the fake shortage that employers are
bellyaching about today. I figure we'll be able to charge about $1-2k per hour
to dive deep and fix a legacy C++ program by that point?

~~~
Clubber
>I figure we'll be able to charge about $1-2k per hour

Knowing my luck, that will be $15 / hour in present dollars. :)

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crusso
When you booted up an Apple II+, you were dumped immediately into a command
prompt. To do ANYTHING useful, you needed to learn to type a few commands like
looking at the directory contents or running a program.

If you just typed in the line '10 PRINT "I AM THE GREATEST!"'

and then "RUN", you had a working program.

Type in a '20 GOTO 10', and you were making magic happen.

These days, kids turn on a computer or their phone and they have no clue as to
what directories are, source code looks like, or how to do even basic things
with a command line.

Things are just too easy for kids these days.

It reminds me of the Butterfly Struggle Story:
[http://instructor.mstc.edu/instructor/swallerm/Struggle%20-%...](http://instructor.mstc.edu/instructor/swallerm/Struggle%20-%20Butterfly.htm)

~~~
blantonl
You could also buy magazines with 1000's of lines of Basic code that required
you to simply type it in and get it working.

So, programming learning methods were different.

First, you had to type in all that code, and inquiring minds would eventually
wonder what each of those lines did. So you would learn something new with
every month's magazine that arrived in the mail.

Second, you had to debug all that code you typed in, because no one can
manually type in 1000's of lines of code copied from a magazine without
errors.

it was a fun time to learn....

~~~
scarface74
It was worse. AppleSoft Basic was so limited that if you wanted to take full
advantage of your computer as a programmer, you had to type in machine
language hex code.

I remember typing in pages of hex code to add the ability for AppleSoft basic
to draw in double hires mode, another program to get more sounds from basic
than the simple peek command could do, shape tables so you could write text in
graphics mode, etc.

At least with Basic you would get syntax errors.

I never did have a real assembler for my Apple IIe. I used the built in
miniassembmer to learn 65C02 assembly. But you couldn't use that to type in
the assembly version of the code in magazines.

------
maxencecornet
Of course, you needed to write down the code instruction in order to play
video games in the 80's

Kids were only motivated by the idea of playing, like kids today, the
difference is that nowadays you can just launch League of legends

~~~
corpMaverick
:) I had to made my own video games. And I had to type them if I wanted to
play. I really didn't play that much since I had already spent my time typing
them.

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hprotagonist
It is not obvious to me when i "began coding".

I edited a QBASIC program (`gorillas.bas`) in ~1994. I was 9, and an IBM
systems programmer was a foot away from me. I wrote a LOGO program to draw my
initials on the screen when i was 11. I stumbled through a J2SE 1.4 course in
at 16 largely by trial and error, and a c++98 class at 18.

The first time I wrote a program and understood anything about what was
happening in moderate detail, i was 19 or 20. (matlab, and shortly thereafter,
latex)

The first time I thought "huh, i can actually code", i was 25. (c#)

I'm 33 now, and I am finally a semi-proficient coder. (python, c#, matlab,
latex, ... )

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mtberatwork
> Another big change that can be attributed to developers starting at a later
> age is that programming is a lot harder now. The BASIC dialects, which many
> people learned to program with in the 1980’s, have largely taken a back seat
> to more powerful (but more complicated) languages like Python, JavaScript,
> and Java.

I think the author is romanticizing the past too much and could probably use a
good refresher course on the history of CS and programming languages.

~~~
detaro
Agreed. Discovery might be harder in some ways (doesn't ship with a normal PC
(well, a JS interpreter does), you'd have to know/figure out _which_ of the
thousands of options is a good one), but other than that I'd say e.g. basic
Python is as accessible as BASIC, and you can easily get a treasure trove of
information about it. Python is a more complex language, but you don't need
all of it.

~~~
mikestew
How long from the time I power on until I print “mikestew is awesome.” in a
loop in Python, on a fresh install of $OS? On an Atari 800 or Apple II, the
answer is “how fast can you type two lines of code?”

~~~
detaro
A few minutes. I don't think the _time_ necessary is all that important.

~~~
taserian
What I feel is most important is reducing the amount of "friction". if the OS
is a GUI Linux with Python, it's just a matter of:

\- opening a terminal

\- `python`

\- `print "mikestew"`

The friction to get over is the Terminal ("You mean I have to type to get the
computer to do something? Why can't I use my mouse?", and the situation if the
above fails because you were using Python 2 or 3.

------
bparsons
Touch screen phones and tablets are depriving kids of a general purpose
computer. The training wheels environment ensures that there is minimal
contact with the actual mechanics of how the device works.

Cory Doctorow had a great article on this 6 years ago:
[https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html](https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html)

I think it is similar to how vehicles evolved in the early 20th century. In
the 1940s and 50s, car engines were designed to be serviced by the user, and
the relative novelty of automobiles meant that a lot of young men made it
their hobby to crack open the hood and tinker around.

Later, as repairability and novelty declined, mechanic work became
professionalized for all but the most hardcore hobbyists.

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scaryclam
I wonder is this is in part because the older home computers often needed the
users (kids) to write out the BASIC game programs in order to play them. This
seems like a nice way to get kids interested in programming.

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klodolph
We can complain that programming is more opaque and difficult than it was. We
like to remember that when you boot an Apple II, you can start typing code a
split second after you flip the power switch. Modern programming environments
aren't like that, and if you told the average programmer to write a program to
draw a graph of sin(x) they might stumble around looking at their APIs for a
while.

But take a look at Scratch, which is commonly used to teach children
programming. It's amazing, way better than anything we had in the 80s or 90s.

~~~
asimpletune
How does it compare to LOGO?

~~~
klodolph
They are similar, and there are even papers comparing learning outcomes for
the two.
[http://ims.mii.lt/ims/konferenciju_medziaga/SIGCSE'10/docs/p...](http://ims.mii.lt/ims/konferenciju_medziaga/SIGCSE'10/docs/p346.pdf)

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candiodari
Think about the differences in the environment:

80s: databases, programming, administration, networks ... that's what you did
with computers, and nobody did this yet. Computers were the future and parents
wanted their kids to know the future, a computer. Only thing to do ?
Developing, and later administration.

Today: cell phones, games and ADS ADS ADS. Distractions, ADS, LOOK HERE, ADS,
ADS, ADS. Everything is a computer, and actual computers (the ones you can
actually program) are the past, not the future, and they won't come back.

Oh and by the way, to develop for those ADS ADS ADS computer/"phone", you need
either a $1200+ machine (ie. a macbook), or a $800+ machine (one that can
reasonably run the android emulator + full IDE, which is bloody heavy, more if
you want it in laptop form).

~~~
nsxwolf
There are interesting programming environments for kids that aren't iOS and
Android. Roblox comes to mind.

Your comments on computer prices leave me scratching my head. The Commodore 64
launched at $595 and that didn't include the disk drive. Adjust that for
inflation.

Also, the tools are free today. I don't remember what I paid for
Editor/Assembler on my TI-99/4A, or my first copy of Borland C for MS-DOS...
but it was a lot.

~~~
candiodari
Sure but the 80s programming environments were useful. You could actually see
your programs you made 10-11 years old used. For bookkeeping, or learning, or
...

No chance of that with Roblox and the like.

------
Cthulhu_
That's because computers today have a million times more possibilities,
especially if connected to the internet.

The lucky few nerds that had access to a computer back when (and keep in mind
it was very much a luxury device with limited use for families) didn't have
that much else to do with it, compared to today.

I'd argue that "today's millennials" (urgh) get to explore a lot more career
and hobby opportunities than they would with computers back then. The
computers back then were specialized devices for the elite and already
technically inclined; today's computers (and phones, etc) are for everyone.

------
joeberon
The main problem with programming is that it is seemingly useless as a hobby.
I have been programming for many years and am quite experienced, yet I never
managed to keep it up consistently because programming project ideas were
either way too complicated requiring hours of research, or really boring. The
main issue with programming as a hobby is coming up with realistic and non-
tedious projects to do.

~~~
Clubber
The thing that got me into coding was running a BBS in the 80s and early 90s.
The ones I ran came with source code, so I modified the BBS to add features,
or make it look unique like someone would do to a car. The changes were
directly seen and used by the users, so it was easy to see the impact. We
would share our code by releasing "mods," so other people could use them. It
was a lot of fun.

I relate to Woz saying he did the stuff he did to show (off) to his friends.
With the BBS, it was the same thing. We had a whole community, but since it
was mostly local, it was closer. We of course had trolls back then too.

Computers before modems were quite boring, especially with limited resources.
You had the manual that came with your computer and maybe another book or two,
or a magazine subscription. Getting a modem really opened up a much larger
world of socialization with other computer people.

FWIW, I started using computers in earnest in 3rd grade. The local school got
a new computer lab of TRS80s and offered after school computer classes; one
for kids and one for adults. I had been fascinated with them before, but I
don't remember when exactly.

~~~
joeberon
I caught the end of the brief period where people were more interested in
programming itself, whereas now programming discord, even in hobby circles,
seems to revolve around entrepreneurship and capitalism.

------
Bromskloss
When personal computers was becoming commonplace and we kids were eager to
learn all about them, I thought that, in the future, everyone would be
computer literate, due to having had computers around already since childhood.
Somehow, I overestimated people.

------
ehudla
My elementary school kids are told about CodeMonkey in school, and they play
with it a bit, but it is just so sad to see them exposed to coding in a task
oriented, graded system, as opposed to the way I was introduced to coding in
school, with Logo.

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cortesoft
I was one of those kids who started with BASIC at age 8 in the 80s.... and I
really disagree with modern scripting languages being more difficult. They
have more things you can do, but it isn’t harder to make a simple program.

~~~
always_good
Also, it's so much more accessible now. I've been working with kids and it's
amazing how many know how to do some basic work in the browser's Javascript
console.

Even if most people never go on to program more than that, those are the baby
steps that you climb from if you do.

------
tezza
There is also a lot of Degree-ism these days compared to 1970s.

Back then anyone could give-it-a-go at any point. Many fewer people expected
to go to university.

These days people anticipate the degree requirements of employers, a self
fulfilling cycle

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bcheung
I noticed that as well. It seems strange to me considering computers are a lot
more accessible now. Back then there was no Internet, YouTube, blogs, etc, to
learn. Just the occasional reference manual.

------
tmaly
I still remember programming in Basic in early to mid 80's. Making a maze
program with warp holes was pretty cool

Today people would probably laugh at this, but it was fun for me and others in
the class

------
petercooper
Well, we had no choice and it was really in our faces to get involved.
Nowadays you can be entertained by a computer endlessly without having any
real idea of how it works.

------
zwieback
I started in 1981 when I was 15 on an Apple ][. This was in Germany and I was
a tiny minority, most kids didn't start until late high-school or early
university.

------
seanvk
Thanks to my trusty Atari 800 in 1981 I learned to program through magazine
articles and books and experimenting with code at home. It was a great
experience.

------
rabboRubble
My first programming experience was on a computer with software loaded from
tape drives. The Commodore 64 was a speedy step up from that!

------
CodeSheikh
Maybe kids today are focused more on "disrupting" markets rather than take a
step back and learn how to program those tools in order to disrupt.

------
corpMaverick
I would imagine that people who learn to program earlier are more like native
speakers. As we know age is very important when we acquire natural languages

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JulianMorrison
That, honestly, wasn't programming. It was very small scale tinkering, or
copying programs out of listings. Or typing the command to load a tape.

~~~
blktiger
I have to agree. I tried typing in programs from magazines and such but that
didn't make me interested in programming at all. I didn't really get serious
about writing code until late in High School / College.

~~~
ryandrake
As a kid I typed in all 450 lines or so of a Star Trek game I found in a BASIC
computer games book back in the early 80s. I remember it taking ages but
that's probably just an artifact of my bad elderly memory. By the time I was
done, I didn't even want to play Star Trek, I just wanted to improve the game
and fix some things that didn't work just right. When I graduated over to a
PC, I ended up porting it to Pascal and giving it a GUI.

------
pera
Shouldn't it be "Gen X kids"? I thought that "millennial" referred to the
generation born during the 80s and 90s.

~~~
jandrese
The title to me read as:

Gen X kids programmed at a younger age than millennials.

------
yters
The problem is today's games are too complex. I started at 8 because I thought
I could make better games.

------
sjclemmy

        10 PRINT “HELLO!”
        20 GOTO 10
    
    

I’ll just leave that there for a bit more 80’s nostalgia.

------
shadyrudy
That was me with and BASIC and QBASIC. I wrote my own metronome so I wouldn't
have to buy one!

------
ComputerInv
I've started with 8. VIC20 BASIC.

------
witwughu391
I started at age 10 on a ZX81 when the only realistic way to code was in
machine-code by typing in hex (it did have BASIC, but nobody used it because
it was too slow)

