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Comment by dwd | Hacker News Reader

Sometimes I feel privileged for being in the generation that learnt to program BASIC on a C64 when it was the coolest thing around at the time. Being that much closer to the metal is a whole different experience of learning what a computer is and can do.

Is that even possible now? Probably not. Years ago I tried to get my kids interested in playing with their own Raspberry Pi when they came out, that they could do whatever they wanted with on the side, to little effect. Not even the idea of setting one up as their own Minecraft server (they were heavily into it at the time) piqued their interest. Oh well.

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Most child of every generation don't care about those things. Most of the few that cared about the C64 just used it to play game. You are in the minority who got interested in the C64 and the minority within that minority who also was interested with BASIC. It's good you tried with your kids but the odds were against you.

Meanwhile, some other kid in your area probably got scolded for installing F-Droid. Oh well...

I totally admire raspberry pi and their attempt to get kids a gateway into cheap computing - made by people the generation who started on those BASIC machines. But I’ve always found it to be a radically different experience on Raspberry Pi given it boots into a full desktop and has endless things to do, compared to the empty terror-filled void that is a blinking BASIC cursor with nothing else on the screen except for some arcane copyright message. Loading a game from tape and experiencing the 5-minute cacophony of that noise was also a surreal and tedious experience for the nippers of the 1980s. It made you really want it in a way that machines since can’t deliver.

Plenty of great tools for kids to start making games with if they're interested in it! Personally, I think running something on a Raspberry Pi isn't very interesting or inviting as a first thing to play with. Creating a game in Roblox, designing an outfit in Roblox, or building a game within Minecraft is more interesting. And people build crazy stuff in Scratch.

But also, not every kid is interested in that anyway.

They used Scratch at school, but you might be right about the Pi just not being inviting.

I tried to learn to program as a kid too. It didn't take, couldn't get past the hello world/simple program stage interest wise. I just wanted to go right to making games. Closest I got was messing with configs and skins and some map making. Took until later in college when I started programming "for real."

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