Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

I'm a veteran of the UK's Golden Age of Computing too, teaching myself first BASIC and then rapidly advancing to assembler on the ZX Spectrum as a teenager. Without that experience I shudder to think what I might have ended up doing for a living.

And I too have been through the same dilemma with my kids. I haven't got far trying to enthuse them with the RPi - even when I got Minecraft running on it, they complained it was too slow...

There was also the huge problem of choice. We had no choice - you learned the language of the system you had. For a couple of years I struggled to choose a language to introduce my son to. A friend of mine even bought an old BBC Micro so he could teach his kids the Old Ways!

But perhaps I over-thought it. A year or so ago I made an arbitrary decision and showed my son how to run Python from the command line, and he picked it up pretty fast. But then he started complaining that he couldn't work on it when he was at school (such is their expectation of cloud ubiquity). Now he's just turned 14, and I've discovered he's developing a pretty ambitious text-based adventure game, still in Python, but using a cloud-based IDE (cannot recall the name).

So whilst I admire the project - the more the better - I think to a certain degree the tools are already there and as long as they're given the seed of interest the kids will go out and find them for themselves.

There's RISC OS Pico. It's a cut-down version of RISC OS for the Raspberry Pi, without the GUI layer. It boots straight into Basic.

http://weblambdazero.blogspot.ch/2015/11/modern-micro-with-r...

It looks like this, and anyone who grew up with the BBC Micro will instantly recognise it:

    RISC OS 192MB
    ARM1176JZF-8 Processor
    Piccolo Systems SDFS
    ARM BBC BASIC VI (C) Acorn 1989
    Starting with 97040636 bytes free
    >_

That's also Acorn's structured Basic, with fast named procedures and multiline control statements, so it's actually reasonable for writing real programs in. It's pretty much COMAL. There's no structured types, unfortunately --- it's still a 1980s language --- but you get still get instant feedback that a traditional micro gave you (and the traditional Basic IDE experience, but I believe they also include the full-screen editor).

Interesting project, but I actually think BASIC is a retrograde step, even with modern tweaks. Each to their own though... as I said in my original post, it's the spark of interest that matters I think, and they can forge their own path from there.

Roguelikes are an easy path into programming. For an easy start, find a well-done 7-day roguelike in your favorite language. For example, z-day is in python (http://sheep.art.pl/Z-Day). Someone learning C might like Day @ the Zoo (C - http://www.happyponyland.net/zoo.php).

Haha, yeah, it's probably hard to get kids to "make" with tech these days instead of just "using" it.

Because much stuff is already there and back in the 90's, when I was in my teens, things looked a bit different.

But funny thing is, even in 2000 people in my school laughed at me for wanting to be a software developer.

"Why do you want to create new software? Everything is already created! I can play games, I can download videos/music and watch it, I can talk to other people online, what else do would you create that isn't already there?!"

What did we have since 2000? Facebook, Twitter, Smartphones, etc.

I think it's important to teach kids that achievement takes serious effort, and that making a blob move around the screen is so much more important than reaching the top of the leaderboard in Call of Duty - which according to my son, many kids just don't get.

I suppose it's a lack of imagination, combined with laziness, which has been reinforced by decades of "Make learning fun!" and "Science is easy!" slogans that the government education tzars love to produce.

well, there are people who make good money with gaming haha

but there are more who make good money with coding

>but there are more who make good money with coding

You should emphasize orders of magnitude more.

Of course, the other problem is that people who make "good money with gaming" aren't actually gaming - they're following a practice regimen that the average gamer wouldn't stick with for more than an hour - refining repetitive mechanical motions, analyzing gameplay to identify faults, fixing those faults through repetitive practice.

An amateur will ask "how do I get better at this game?" and, when you tell them, say "no thanks, I'd rather just play the game."

When people hear the term "pro gamer" they think, well these people just sat around all day playing games and suddendly they get paid mad bucks.

People think a similar thing about game developers, of course neither is true.

People mock professional athletes the same way.

I did several years of programming in high school. Our teacher had first learned to program in BASIC on TRS-80 and wanted us to have the same first introduction, so we actually started with a gentle introduction to programming on TI-83 calculators in TI-BASIC which we did for about a month (for a year long first year course). My fun achievement was a Tic-Tac-Toe game that could play as 2 player or with an AI. It was pretty crude how I accomplished it, but it played well.

Looking back, it was a great idea, because it is one of the few ways to get the feel of retro computing and programming, along with its advantages to getting started, that is still useful and relevant. My TI-BASIC knowledge continued to be helpful into college.

I seem to recall that the initial plan for the OLPC was that everything was done in python, because they wanted the kids to explore and modify.

BTW, i recall Intel showing off a variant of the python interpreter being run directly from GRUB. Would have been interesting to see that ported to RPi. Also, i think there was someone working on a Python CLI that could replace bash etc.

> BTW, i recall Intel showing off a variant of the python interpreter being run directly from GRUB.

That was me: https://biosbits.org/ , presented at Pycon 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYQ_lq5dcvM and 2016 with networking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlkKvetGFSk

> Also, i think there was someone working on a Python CLI that could replace bash etc.

That was "xonsh" (http://xonsh.org/ , pronounced "conch"), by Anthony Scopatz, presented at PyCon 2016: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaje5I22kgE

Why CLI and not IDE for Python? I'm using PyCharm with a console pane.

Could/does he use github and an online REPL from school?

Interested as I've been learning Python to use with my slightly younger kids.

Because I fell out with Jetbrains over their pricing model :)

Also, in school they have some pretty serious restrictions on what they can access. And git might be a bit hard for a kid to learn.

There's a free Educational version of PyCharm (for both three major platforms): https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/download/

All their IDEs are free for students who "have access to their student email address or a valid ISIC card" by the way: https://www.jetbrains.com/student/

Edit: link added

Thanks for that, I'll look into it.

Yes, I'm using the free community edition (2016.1 at present). Also I said "github", when doing school type exercises for a Coursera course I uploaded stuff to a gist on GitHub (https://gist.github.com/) to work on in breaks at work - just simply 20 line max programs, any text dump would be equivalent for how I was using it. PyCharm of course can integrate with git but I only use that locally.

https://repl.it/languages/Python/ helped me out, as did http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html.

Do you think learning git is harder than learning how to program?

No, but I think it's unnecessary noise and let's face it, git will be ancient history 10 years from now so kids should focus on learning fundamental concepts rather than a particular tool that's fashionable now.

How is git unnecessary and unfashionable noise?

What do you propose will replace the tool a decent chunk of people use to work on large software projects together?

Ten years ago everybody used SVN, it's not unreasonable to assume that git will be replaced by something else.

Git is now 11 years old. What up and coming VCS was developed last year to replace git? VCS development moves relatively slowly* and git will still be a major player in 10 years.

Though in 10 years I suspect the porcelain and workflows will have collected several new features.

* Git in fact rose in popularity unusually fast. But this was probably because it was born at the intersection of two major events - DVCS were the hot new field and wide open for new players, and the kernel's VCS crisis. I imagine that hosting the kernel on day one would provide as much experience as a decade of being a small experimental VCS. This is not a routine combination of events.

What @adrianN said. Some other version control system.

In fact, on the subject of fundamental stuff... when I first started out, version control was a drawer full of audio cassette tapes that I cycled through, overwriting old tapes with new versions! Collaborative working? The postal service.

So yeah, things move on, but they will continue to move and although git is pretty elegant, it has rough edges and a fiendish CLI interface that very few people fully understand, so I think there is plenty of room for improvement.

Git might be ancient history but version control will never disappear.

Absolutely right. Git will not last forever. We've already had had VCS, SourceSafe, Perforce, SVN...

Although it might last a long time in it's own niche. Perforce is definitely still alive and kicking in the games industry. Git might eventually return to just being the VCS of choice for the linux kernel.

Heh, I still use RCS on a semi-regular basis...

I think it's less fun to learn than programming. Which can be a deterrent for kids or anyone learning programming at the same time (which is hard enough without adding on git).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com