[vidarh]

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.

[randomdata]

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.