As far as I can tell, you've hit the bullseye here! This looks amazing. The Nature of Code looks exactly like the kind of thing I'm interested in. Thanks very much.
It was all part of my dastardly plan to get inappropriate advice by misrepresenting the way I learn! But I have failed miserably, because all these people gave me really helpful advice... Seriously, though - yeah, I am definitely someone that sometimes overthinks things, but that's actually worked out pretty well for me in life, so I'm quite relaxed about it. So, yes, I do basically much prefer the idea of getting a tutorial that's perfect for someone with my mindset by trying to find other likeminded people online before I get stuck in rather than just going for the first tutorial I find on Google. Sounds like that's not how you would do things, which is fine. Different people work in different ways, I guess!
This looks like a great game, but I'm not sure it would give me enough freedom to experiment and actually make stuff. Definitely glad it's out there and looks like a great way to learn.
Your experience sounds similar to mine. I'm going to experiment a bit on my own first, but I might well take you up on your offer of a chat after a little while. Thanks!
Thanks for your suggestion - I've had a little look and this does seem spot on in terms of being able to quickly build actual projects. Even though you're far removed from the workings of the computer itself, it looks like you're able to throw yourself into the code without too much preamble. Definitely feeling inspired by this - thanks very much!
Fair point. What I mean by "hacker" may well be different from what other people mean. I just mean a mindset which some people may think reckless but that others may find exhilarating: tinkering with something, trying to figure out empirically how it works and how you can improve on it, while ignoring learning all the theory and sensible basics until/unless you find you need to understand it to get past a particular obstacle. Probably not a good way to build a career, but great fun to a certain kind of person (like me). It's what I used to do as a kid, and I had great success with it. I'm hoping it's possible to replicate in some aspect of modern computing, but I'm put off by the layers of systems and tools and SDKs that I get the impression are involved in most programming these days. So I'm looking for a context in which this kind of "hacker" (to me) mindset might still be alive and well.
I take your point but actually, for me, at least in the initial stages, I'm just looking to recreate a feeling from my youth: tinkering with ideas and letting one discovery move me onto the next, figuring out how things work and seeing if I can improve on them. But I think you're right, up to a point, if there was an open source game or robot which was created using fairly low-level programming, so I could enjoy just tinkering with the code without having to learn lots of tools etc., it would be more inspirational than just trying to learn "for the sake of it" with a textbook, so thanks for your perspective.