Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by gaius 5185 days ago
I still maintain that

  - Start -> Run -> notepad
  - <html>Hello, World!</html>, Save As "hello.htm" on desktop
  - double-click it and watch it appear in a browser
Is 1% of 1% of the effort it took to program an 8-bit machine.
3 comments
vidarh 5185 days ago
The difference is how easy it is to find the information about what to do.

Someone totally new won't know what notepad is, won't know what html is, and won't know how to make the browser show it, and the manual that came with his computer will say nothing about it.

You start a browser, there's no hint what to do. You start searching for "how to make a web page" and you get a bewildering array of information, some of which are totally over-engineered.

On the other hand hooked up a VIC-20 or C-64, opened the manual, and what stared you in the face in the first chapter was your first program.

link
randomdata 5185 days ago
I remember opening a browser, selecting the "View Source" option, and there was my first web page. I really started to learn how to program when a misconfigured web server spit out the source code to a web app that I enjoyed using.

I think the commonality between us here is that having access to the source itself provides the best learning environment.

link
jbooth 5185 days ago
Yeah, but the thing with that is, it fucking sucks.

What about 10 print "HELLO" 20 GOTO 10

Or something like that? If I wanted hello world on the screen I'd get a piece of damn paper. The beauty of quick basic was it got you into procedural code, where the computer does stuff. You can get someone going with Python relatively easily but not as easy as QBasic was on a Mac II in the school computer lab.

You can say there's been a cultural shift but every generation's been saying "kids these days", back to at least Socrates. I'd say that not having QBasic be one of 6 icons you can click is a bigger change, it's not the kids.

link
lubutu 5185 days ago
You may as well just open up notepad and type "Hello, world!", and leave it at that. HTML is not a programming language; if you want to program on the Web you do have to jump into JavaScript.
link