[uglycoyote]

I'm a game developer but not specifically a graphics programmer. Although I work with modern graphics APIs and GLSL shaders in my day job, when my 13 year old recently graduated from wanting to program in Scratch or Python to wanting to learn C++, I decided the best thing to do was break out the old OpenGL 1.2 DLL's that I still had on my machine since 1999 and starting him writing some code using glut and glbegin/glvertex/glend type of immediate programming.

it is just a lot more fun than trying to suffer through all of the setup that one needs to do with modern APIs. he is more interested in computational geometry type of things like voronoi diagrams so the graphics API is really just a means to an end and fancy shaders and lighting aren't important right now, and performance in C++ and old school OpenGL is about a thousand times faster than Scratch, so I think we hit a sweet spot for where he is at in terms of his progression of learning.

even with the simplified API of OpenGL 1.2, he is still biting off a pretty ambitious chunk of learning to try to grasp c++ at the same time as OpenGL, so the simplicity helps keep it sane and manageable, and things are going well. He did some neat marching squares demos and I helped add an IMgui menu to tune parameters at runtime. it has been entertaining!