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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

I mostly agree with you¹, however, it is a problem if the current computing environments does not actually allow people to do anything of their own. Just like 80’s computers had BASIC, there should be Flash-like authoring programs which people could write shareable programs on. But there aren’t! Specifically the sharing part, I mean. You can’t write a simple Poke the Penguin app and send it to your friend for fun anymore. You’re at the whims of enormous gatekeepers and censors.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106922#19113359

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There's environments like Scratch, Jupyter notebooks, Minecraft, and even Roblox where kids definitely build experiences for each other. The problem is, standards have gotten a lot higher these days. When I was a kid, I fooled around and made RPGs that looked similar to the ones that my friends played on home consoles. Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together.

These days it's become much simpler to put together attractive videos which is why so many kids want to become streamers. Buy a nice camera and a few lights and you can produce media that looked like movies I watched as a kid.

> Now a AAA game will be much more engaging than anything a kid can put together.

Two thoughts:

1) I kinda agree, and it's interesting how many of the founders of game studios who are now retiring, got their start on the 8/16bit home computers as teenagers making games that were the AAA titles of their day, because the upper bounds on game size/complexity were so low.

2) There has never been a better time for free tooling and instruction for kids who are interested in building games. Unreal Engine 5 and the thousands of hours of youtube tutorials for it, is quite a starting point to have. It puts the Shoot Em Up Construction Kit that I would have spent hours in, in the 90s, to complete shame!

1. Yup, they also had the advantage of being able to learn as the industry grew. They were at the forefront of the industry, developing the first 3D rendering pipelines, creating the first textures, scenes, etc. Nowadays it's a lot more knowledge to absorb. I feel the same way about networking. I think any young field is like this. There must have been a time when making bicycles or cars was like this too, when real progress was made through incremental experimentation.

2. 100%. I mean, I know many in my cohort who got interested in graphics programming by playing with Gary's Mod. There's still plenty of ways to make games or programs for friends. I'm still convinced that the kids (with stable/solvent home lives) interested in programming and making a computer do their bidding are supremely capable. I mean today learning a bit of Javascript is all you need to get started on the web.

You can send Swift Playgrounds apps to other people over messages. To pick just one example, from what's often the main target of these "LOL these aren't real computers" sorts of complaints. If you're on a desktop, there are tons of ways, most more accessible than Back In My Day.

I do think we lost something when Flash in particular died, but less apps/games (there are... a lot of very, very indie games made these days by solo hobbyists or enthusiasts, check places like itch.io, it's an overwhelming number) and more the independent animation scene, which was huge during the heyday of flash but seems mostly dead now.

> You can’t write a simple Poke the Penguin app

You just have to write it in HTML and Javascript.

Oh, cool. So I have to learn two languages. And it's going to look like shit if I don't also learn CSS, so three languages. And then there's meta-languages, like frameworks and CSS pre-processors. Writing a web-page that lets you log in and looks halfway cool isn't an inviting project for a ten-year-old.

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