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Nowadays, programming is much more complex than it used to be (unless you consider toy programming languages). For me, visual feedback was always a key factor in the things that I made. When I started, there was no top down or bottom up. You just started programming, and you actually understood what was happening because it was not that complicated. Let me give you an example. QBasic is the first language that I learned. Suppose you want to draw a white pixel in the left upper corner on the screen. To do this, you can do:
SCREEN 13
PSET (0, 0), 15 If you understand this and for-loops it is trivial to fill the screen with a color. Then the next step is to make the color of the pixel dependent on the position. I made some wonderful graphical stuff with this (rotozoomers, plasma, fire effects...). Now, if I want to do this in C(++), I probably can, but it will take me at least an hour of research. Same thing for C#, Java, Haskell, and so on. This is not a completely fair comparison since QBasic ran in DOS and there was no need to summon a window, but that is exactly my point: things keep getting more complex. To plot a colored pixel on the screen in QBasic, you have to know about pixels, screens and colors. To do this in a more modern environment, chances are you have to pick the right API and understand all abstractions it introduces (probably including windows, graphical contexts, buffers...). The trend seems to be to ever more abstract, complex, and powerful frameworks. If you are already a programmer, this is a gradual progress and it is feasible to keep track of everything, but for new programmers it takes a looooong time to get up to date with all the new abstractions that people have come up with (and I think are not always that important to start programming). Now I'm not saying that we should not introduce abstractions or frameworks or implying that DOS graphics were better than today's system with windows. I'm just saying that these advances come at a high cost, and I don't know if there is a solution. |