[cstrat]

My dad introduced me to Visual Basic when I was 13 and it honestly changed the trajectory of my life. Prior to this I wasn't overly interested in learning anything in particular. VB became a creative outlet and since that day I never stopped learning.

Loved hitting up PlanetSourceCode to get scripts and reverse engineer other peoples code to learn.

I built so many fun programs - the best of which was a chat programs using UDP so we could chat over the schools local network.

[m_st]

Similar here :-) But what would you introduce your kids today? It seems the learning curve is much steeper.

[arnaudvalette]

Well, at 13 I did build some weird CLI based text adventures in c++, mostly imperative style and badly written. I knew only how to declare a variable, how to cout/cin, loops and conditions, due to the fact that access to information was almost impossible (we had something like a subscription plan with a limited 20 hours of internet, and finding websites that I could understand about developing in C++ was hard).

I remember the feeling I had the day I learned about classes and functions, a true "wow" moment.

Unfortunately those text adventures died with the hard drive of the computer my parents had.

[cstrat]

Yeah I often think about this too... everything today feels so complex, although VB was probably just as complex under the hood. The complexity was just masked by the GUI and WYSIWYG interface.