I have a hard time believing an eight year old child was watching Doom 3 developer talks and telling his kindergarden friends about buffer shadows and Carmack's Reverse.
Back in the 80's having 10 year olds show off Z80 Assembly on their Speccy and C64 wasn't that extraordinary, what was impressive is the ideas many would think of without nothing else besides a couple of books and nothing else.
I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital).
Is there any modern equivalent? If you could control a child's computer access and didn't care about them missing out on tiktok etc what would you do? Of course a refurbed ZX Spectrum is an option, as is Scratch or some other hand-holding environment. I'd be interested to know if anyone is raising tough, rugged, Mel-type hackers[0] these days, and how they're going about it.
The modern equivalent doesn't look the same at all if you want equivalent motivation.
We all dicked around with "shitty" computers and learned all the stupid trivia you had to memorize to use them, back then, because that's all there was and you could make your own bad text adventure or crack some commercial game or whatever and your friends might think it's cool, because that was state of the art, or close to it, and anyway you had to get about half-way to being able to program a computer just to be able to run games or play around in a text or image editor. The extrinsic motivation for hacking on some modern C64 clone or what have you is far lower than it was then.
Minecraft modding is probably the closest modern equivalent.
I agree with your take, just wanted to add Roblox to that list containing Minecraft modding as well.
Kids create almost full blown games in Roblox these days. Most of what they create is ofc extremely basic and is of poor quality, but they are kids. And the outliers can get pretty insane, in a good way.
Yeah I think this is a good point. Around ~8th grade I got pretty far into making a Final Fantasy 6-inspired JRPG in QBASIC with some friends. Obviously it was not remotely professional quality. But the delta between it and a "real" game wasn't THAT insane. There's only so much you can pack into little 8 or 16 bit sprites. It's very easy to write a 2D tile based engine, there was a lot of info on the Internet about it even then back in the late 90s. I didn't need to know college level math to do basic 2D rendering and effects. If making a somewhat presentable game in the 90s interested you, it was all pretty attainable with study and work.
Nowadays, for my own kids, the equivalent would be trying to write... Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom from scratch? Which is like asking them to solve cold fusion based on a middle school understanding of science. It's laughable. Making "old grandpa games" doesn't motivate them. Which is a bummer, because hacking on that crappy QBASIC RPG definitely set me on the path to a lifelong interest and career in tech. (Unfortunately it was never finished, because my HDD died, and the backup I periodically dumped to a floppy was unreadable, so several years of effort were lost. Great early lesson about backups not meaning shit unless you regularly test that you can restore them...).
I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays the way we had it in the 80ies and 90ies (or even earlier, but I'm an 80ies child, haha). At best with some kind of limited hardware or in some narrow area like writing games. Also, surely not with Scratch. Scratch is, what you give a 5 year old to learn some concepts in my opinion. My children were appalled by it when they became 10 cause it's "baby stuff". At least those kids interested in programming.
The thing in the 80ies and early 90ies was, that you could actually, as a kid, compete with something professional and have total control over the outcome, if you had a bit of talent in any area. This was unbelievably motivating.
Where can one person or two people nowadays seriously compete with professionals and have serious control over the outcome? If at all in the area, where you will actually find kids today: Roblox games, Unity games, anything with a finished engine, where they can focus on the content itself because anything else will simply be unrealistically large effort.
Also, limited retro hardware things might work, I do not know. For me, if I was a child again, they would not work because these are things that are too limited - I would always know there are really powerful PCs with all 3d stuff around. As said above, the fantasy of being able to do anything some software company could do was what motivated me in the 80ies/early 90ies, so I'd rather probably teach myself some game engine, too, because that allows me to live the state-of-the-art fantasy. At least I assume that.
Another thing old hardware did, by the way, which modern hardware does not, is that it launched people on a programming learning path immediately, if they desired to successfully use it. You could not use a C64 without learning at least a tiny little bit of basic.
> I am skeptical that this can be repeated at all nowadays
For me I think it was more of an access issue that caused me to want to do it. Once you were done with the 2-3 games you might have. You started getting the mags from the library and typing things in and hoping it would work (no typos!). Just so you could get another game.
Along the way you picked up tons of low level programming. The computers of the time were 'batteries included' usually including some form of BASIC and then an escape into the world of ASM if you knew the right incantations. After awhile you would find hey this programming thing is sort of fun too.
But today a kid has some access to things like what you point out. But however they also have access to thousands of other games for a very reasonable price. The older systems you better be committed to getting that game you wanted as they were decently priced high enough you had to shell out a decent amount of cash to get it. With free to play and thousands of low priced games plus the massive catalogs of older systems. Getting a game is now 'easy' and cheap.
On my old computers apple2, c64 and ti994a the prompt to launch things was a programming prompt. With the GUI world there is no prompt just files and icons. Getting an IDE setup on most modern systems is not hard but it is an extra step (and fiddly with some of them). You are then presented with a blank canvas but you have to know how to fill out the form to get it to do anything at all.
Could we replicate the old systems? Totally. Would anyone actually use them? Not so much as to 'get things done' the GUI is way better. There is a step missing if we want to replicate what we had. But is 'what we had' the right way to program? That I am not convinced of. Pretty sure if I said 'yes' that would be my bias of using it that way showing. We would have to have a different way that still brings people up step by step we had but fits into the current landscape of computers.
One of the more underexamined consequences of computers being so ubiquitous and widespread is how it's affected child rearing. Any parent or anyone who works with children knows one of the most important parts of child rearing is socialization. It's imperative that your child gets along with other children, always has been. Today, with children being given access to social media, that means that your child too will have to be given access to social media in order to fit in. The reason being that this is what kids will talk about amongst each other primarily, it will constitute much of their interests early in life.
The problem of course with this mandatory exposure is that it's vampiric. The odds of getting a kid into 6502 assembly after they've been exposed to the monoamine explosion of trite garbage like TikTok may as well be an impossibility. Deprive them of that explosion... they'll probably not have a good time with their peers. Social ostracization will harm their personal development, and they will experience it if they can't yap about the latest memes with the other snotlings. They'll grow to resent you for making them the weirdo with nil cultural knowledge.
It's a rather worrisome situation, honestly. The best route to getting kids into programming, in my opinion, is through Roblox or making Fortnite custom maps. It's stuff they can share with their friends in a medium that they'll enjoy and think is cool. It fits in with their cultural motions. If you do a good job of encouraging their experiences doing so and instilling a hunger for more and deeper knowledge, eventually they'll move on to greater horizons.
I say this as someone that's absolutely loathe to do any of this. I would want to raise my child on Plan 9. Teach them how to write 6502, how to write lua, how to write C. But it's just not how the world works anymore.
I highly recommend hooking your kid up with pico-8.
It's a simple little 'fantasy' console with tons of tools to make gamedev streamlined. It's really caught on fire with the gamedev community and you can tell there was a lot of pent up creativity out there that was sick of the complexity of modern gamedev and just wanted a tight little environment to make simple indie games with. I'm not doing a good enough job describing it, but the website is below and check out the youtube overview.
Well there probably would be more those kind of genius-autist-savants if children were allowed and encouraged to pursue their interest. Instead what usually happens when and if a child becomes obsessed with some topic is that instead of allowing child to pursue what he is passionate about by guiding a child towards a more constructive path(if necessary), he gets penalized for it. Repeatedly and as often as it takes for the child to stop dreaming. And that is such an incredibly stupid waste of human resources.
Yep, same here. I didn’t know what I wasn’t supposed to do so I tried whatever. Spending hours just typing nonsense until something worked. Getting the monitor to display different colors was certainly exciting! I never made it into demos but sure did spent way too much time poking around my c64.
Those were good days! I was learning machine code programming from a book as well when I was 11. Hand translating assember to bytes. No internet. Nobody to help when I got stuck. Just my (constantly crashing when I got it wrong) ZX-Spectrum and a book. Those were fun times!
I started programming at 7, i was certainly telling my friends about all the random stuff i barely had a smidge of understanding while trying to program simple games myself - i could barely move a smiley face (DOS ASCII character 2) on screen to collect hearts (DOS ASCII character 3) and yet i was certain i could make a game like Prince of Persia once i figured out how to draw lines on screen with Turbo Pascal's BGI.
hmmm, I don't feel too skeptical about it - I think it just sounds more impressive in hindsight where it can be described in full clarity (and probably underestimating how much was picked up in the months/years afterward). I was writing HyperTalk around the age of 9, after learning the "secret" command of "set userlevel to 5" [0], although it was kinda difficult without any documentation (I just opened other existing Stacks to see how stuff was done). If you grew up around computers and had a knack for it, well, a youthful brain just soaks up everything it's exposed to, really.
This actually reminds me of how valuable it can be to expose kids to complex/depthful things from an early age -- some will dive right in and embrace it, and potentially enjoy a rewarding experience with the particular subject.. For me it was computers, and at the time I really couldn't get enough.
I started when I was around 10, and made my first "game engine" in C++ at around 12 or 13. If anything, doing this type of thing when you're that young is easier (unlimited free time, and young brains probably learn things more easily). The only real barrier is interest/motivation.
My barrier at that age was just information. Obviously things have become much easier now.
Having windows 95 as your first OS made this particularly difficult and the Internet was what it was at that time.
It took me years to find the right questions to ask and the right information. What took me several years to figure out I have tought someone in an afternoon. (getting from 0 to a short roadmap to something functional).
Yeah, I always wished so badly I knew an adult who was a skilled programmer. I borrowed books from the library but I would always hit a wall so early on, not being able to make sense of the concepts (and being on a Mac, which none of the books provided a compiler for). Looking back I know for a fact I could have grasped the concepts if they were explained a little more "gradually" for me, which a mentor-type person absolutely could have done easily.
Without mentorship / guidance, how are you supposed to know that K&R and / or Petzold (and maybe A. S. Tanenbaum?) are where it's at, and everything else is arguably a waste of your time? Almost every programming book I encountered seemed intent on making the computer appear mysterious and esoteric which did not help me feel empowered to explore.
I even got to K&R. Types, variables, input and output made sense to young me. Pointers made sense but I couldn't wrap my head around why, and then I was stuck with "what next". For years everything next I could find (like writing a windows application) was way over my head and any "step 2" was completely elusive.
I don't know...When I was kid we used to talk poking memory addresses for cheats while playing c64 games and we were all 9-11 years old. Kids do darnest things.
Montessori has nothing to do with this, my triple experience is that kids figure out the method allows them to derp around, and they will derp around. The school tells nothing as keeping the cash coming in is more important than kids education.
A passionate kid is passionate, the method is not making him passionate.
He just likes programming. He likes building stuff. One of his best friends is a kid his age who lives across the country. They just like being productive.
At the end of my previous post, I was trying to dispel this idea that kids under ten are incapable of doing things independently. That they're incapable of engaging in things like an adult. If a 3 year old can grocery shop and make a cake, an 8 year old can watch a game dev talk. Can be obsessed with game engines. Can learn to juggle.
My niece wrote a blog post years ago when she was under ten, and the comments she got were "your parents must have written this for you, you aren't capable of having done this" which is absurd. Don't act like kids are incapable just because the ones you see are incapable.
I booted a hobby OS I had written in C on the family PC (off of a floppy disk!) by the time I was 13. Kids can have a lot of free time to mess around with this stuff - I would love to see what I could do now with a whole summer off.
Eh, you're overestimating OP's statement. I think they're roughly my age and at eight I was busy figuring out Win32 APIs and DLL imports in Object Pascal to make _rad utility programs_. I probably would've immediately gone into game modding if not for the fact that I was using a late 90s Dell notebook that had like 8MB of VRAM :) Two years later I had a bunch of game servers running entire custom gamemodes implemented in LUA with other kids _loving it_.
I started programming when I was 8. Certainly not to the point where I would understand Carmack's reverse and buffer shadows but there are people much smarter than me and information has never been more available than it is today so I don't think its completely implausible.
although the magic of carmack's reverse to me is how it was a passing thought for me in a gamedev book written by an over privileged silly valley asshat in my teens... and turned out to be gold.
I am sure what I am telling here, because I was one of those kids, with whatever we could get from the local library, coupled with Input magazines, and some Portuguese newspapers with computing stuff on fridays (A Capital).
By 14 I was already into Demoscene stuff.
EDIT: Naturally it was 6502 on the C64.