Comment by gwittel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gwittel | Hacker News Reader

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This makes me so happy. The demoscene is what made me want to learn to program in the first place. The first demo I saw was Heartquake by Iguana (Asm 1994) - http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=364 . I can still hear the credits music in my head. Jare and team, if you read this -- thank you!

Never did get around to making my own demo, but I owe finding my career path early in life to the demoscene. So many fond memories (esp early 90s through 00s).

I have and will spend countless hours coding to demoscene music (good and bad). To me, the unique thing somewhat lost in my avg day to day development life is that this is a fundamentally self driven challenge that can cross many CS disciplines combined with the art of practice. A demo pushes one in many directions at once: art, math, graphics, data structures, optimization, mechanical sympathy, sound, etc. (There's a reason there is a lot of game dev <-> scene crossover.). You can work in isolation, or as a group. However, a group is more common since most people can't do it all.

Digression aside -- Could we use the demoscene as a gateway for future engineers? A STEM + demo style toolkit?

You made my day, thank you for the kind words! I learned so much from so many people in the scene, and made great friends to this day, I'm happy and lucky I could give some back. :)

Oh man, the ending credits to that demo blew me away. This was only 3 years after Michael Jackson's Black & White, and a couple after Terminator 2 and here was basically kids doing the same special effect on commodity PCs in real-time. (not to mention commercial game quality 3d terrain)

As for your question: coding used to be really viewed as a creative activity, akin to any other art form. Now it's just data plumbing and CRUD apps. For the people who really still view coding as an art, the demoscene can absolutely be a gateway.

I think the most important thing being in the scene taught me was how to do teamwork on a complex technical project with vague and ambiguous requirements. I didn't encounter another environment like that until maybe grad school and professional development work. It prepared me in ways I still rely on, decades later.

The competitive nature of the scene also prepares people well to work in non-academic/commercial places where the only proof of success is winning. Academia has nothing quite like this.

Note that when we released Heartquake, many people in the group, and definitely the programmers, had college degrees, several years of professional experience, and/or multiple commercial videogames published.

It was quite a shock when I first entered Assembly 93 (my first demoparty ever) in Kerava, and saw all those teenagers installing Linux or programming or making music or being awesome. Already well in our 20s, we were kind of old for the scene already. :)

That’s a really good point about preparing for industry. So many people don’t get much experience starting from a blank slate.

I think for me, the question is how to make it a more obvious gateway. As a child we had things like the spartan C64 or logo. There are some modern equivalents but most are simple. Hard to inspire kids with that compared to what they see (vs an 80s kid). Perhaps on online repl (like shadertoy) plus a demo 101 lib with pre baked effect routines and simple graphics primitives?

I think the two places I'm seeing this right now are in the Processing/P5 community (https://editor.p5js.org), and interesting things built on top of Glitch.

Hydra is fascinating -- I sat down with it for a couple hours and was having lots of fun layering transformations on top of webcam input. https://github.com/ojack/hydra

Made my day too, much love! (Yann/Iguana) :)

I think we can still use it as gateway, specially if we introduce younger generations to coding in ESP286, ESP32, Arduino, Microbit based game consoles.

Lua, MicroPython, TypeScript, JavaScript can play the introductory role of Basic in those days.

Followed by .NET (micro), TinyGo, C, C++, Rust, FreePascal as the next level.

Finally the hardcore kids can deep dive into Assembly.

The real gateway to get into programming is by letting your child play a game and then teach it how to cheat with cheat engine. Start with a simple memory scan and work your way up to using the code debugger to see how asm is executed. (There is no need to actually learn it in detail, just understand what types of instructions exist: test, jump, call, add, etc)

Once your child has an intuition of how a computer works its pretty trivial to teach programming. There are still lots of language specific gotchas though.

Agreed embedded is probably a good way to go. Much simpler to understand systems, along with simpler ASM.

Many schools in the US have organized robotics programs, but those are expensive and require a lot of support. Making a demo is know how, and some HW.

Probably the main thing missing is the the materials. I've been skimming through the links here to find good starting points. Its a lot to collect -- many of the entry level techniques are so old, they're not always written up (or the target audience is different).

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