80's kids started programming at an earlier age than today's millennials

I was an 80s kid (born in 1980, in fact). I started programming in BASIC on the family Apple ][e sometime between kindergarten and 2nd grade, I can&#x27;t remember anymore now. My mother is a software engineer (who started programming in college, on punch cards) and had to suffer through me constantly badgering her for help early on :)<p>The Apple ][e became an Amiga and I moved on to AMOS, then a 486 when I finally switched over to hacking around in &quot;real&quot; languages like C and Pascal on DOS, windows, and eventually Linux. Then came college (I knew I was going to major in Computer Science since... always).<p>My resume shows a little more than 10 years of &#x27;professional&#x27; programming experience, which is all anyone cares about, but when you hire an 80s kid like me, you&#x27;re getting a lot more experience than you imagine.<p>Yea, yea, a lot of the early stuff was undisciplined hacking and flailing without the proper theoretical grounding of a CS education. But I say it still counts for something :)

We really need to find a way to restore the &quot;home computer&quot;: You turn it on, there is a BASIC prompt.<p>(Of course we can&#x27;t restore it 1:1, but that quality is so valuable)<p>UPDATE: I was probably a bit, er, terse. I am really about restoring that <i>quality</i>, and yes, the world has moved on and is in many ways better, so we absolutely cannot &quot;go back&quot;, and yes, it is absolutely not a trivial problem. In fact, I&#x27;d say it is very, very hard. But so worthwhile.<p>Components are: open source; languages, particularly for UI programming that make &quot;open source&quot; meaningful (giving people the ability to tinker); development&#x2F;customization interfaces on devices (shame on you, Apple...and almost everyone else), languages and libraries&#x2F;frameworks that collapse our incredible complexity stack for the many simple things we want to do, etc.

I wanted to be a business man as a kid (See pet Businessman Kids in the Hall). I would look at the source for every program Apple provided in an attempt to help me to learn how to build programs (the few that were in basic vs hex).<p>I started programming at roughly 7 in 1980 by sneaking away to get on the Apple ][ computers the school had. My own 5.25&quot; disk was like a gateway into another dimension.<p>I&#x27;ve done several speeches on career days at my local elementary, middle and high schools. Kids have no interest in learning how computers work anymore in my experience. I always offer them full lists of resources and offer free mentoring. Have never had a kid follow up in 20+ years of doing this. Which I would have killed for that opportunity as a child.<p>I think partly it&#x27;s when I describe the job of being a game programmer though. It&#x27;s work, what they want to be is a game designer, which is really just a game player. And there&#x27;s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I just wonder where all the curious kids went.

When you booted up an Apple II+, you were dumped immediately into a command prompt. To do ANYTHING useful, you needed to learn to type a few commands like looking at the directory contents or running a program.<p>If you just typed in the line &#x27;10 PRINT &quot;I AM THE GREATEST!&quot;&#x27;<p>and then &quot;RUN&quot;, you had a working program.<p>Type in a &#x27;20 GOTO 10&#x27;, and you were making magic happen.<p>These days, kids turn on a computer or their phone and they have no clue as to what directories are, source code looks like, or how to do even basic things with a command line.<p>Things are just too easy for kids these days.<p>It reminds me of the Butterfly Struggle Story: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;instructor.mstc.edu&#x2F;instructor&#x2F;swallerm&#x2F;Struggle%20-%20Butterfly.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;instructor.mstc.edu&#x2F;instructor&#x2F;swallerm&#x2F;Struggle%20-%...</a>

Of course, you needed to write down the code instruction in order to play video games in the 80&#x27;s<p>Kids were only motivated by the idea of playing, like kids today, the difference is that nowadays you can just launch League of legends

It is not obvious to me when i &quot;began coding&quot;.<p>I edited a QBASIC program (`gorillas.bas`) in ~1994. I was 9, and an IBM systems programmer was a foot away from me. I wrote a LOGO program to draw my initials on the screen when i was 11. I stumbled through a J2SE 1.4 course in at 16 largely by trial and error, and a c++98 class at 18.<p>The first time I wrote a program and understood anything about what was happening in moderate detail, i was 19 or 20. (matlab, and shortly thereafter, latex)<p>The first time I thought &quot;huh, i can actually code&quot;, i was 25. (c#)<p>I&#x27;m 33 now, and I am finally a semi-proficient coder. (python, c#, matlab, latex, ... )

&gt; Another big change that can be attributed to developers starting at a later age is that programming is a lot harder now. The BASIC dialects, which many people learned to program with in the 1980’s, have largely taken a back seat to more powerful (but more complicated) languages like Python, JavaScript, and Java.<p>I think the author is romanticizing the past too much and could probably use a good refresher course on the history of CS and programming languages.

Touch screen phones and tablets are depriving kids of a general purpose computer. The training wheels environment ensures that there is minimal contact with the actual mechanics of how the device works.<p>Cory Doctorow had a great article on this 6 years ago: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;lockdown.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;boingboing.net&#x2F;2012&#x2F;01&#x2F;10&#x2F;lockdown.html</a><p>I think it is similar to how vehicles evolved in the early 20th century. In the 1940s and 50s, car engines were designed to be serviced by the user, and the relative novelty of automobiles meant that a lot of young men made it their hobby to crack open the hood and tinker around.<p>Later, as repairability and novelty declined, mechanic work became professionalized for all but the most hardcore hobbyists.

I wonder is this is in part because the older home computers often needed the users (kids) to write out the BASIC game programs in order to play them. This seems like a nice way to get kids interested in programming.

We can complain that programming is more opaque and difficult than it was. We like to remember that when you boot an Apple II, you can start typing code a split second after you flip the power switch. Modern programming environments aren&#x27;t like that, and if you told the average programmer to write a program to draw a graph of sin(x) they might stumble around looking at their APIs for a while.<p>But take a look at Scratch, which is commonly used to teach children programming. It&#x27;s amazing, way better than anything we had in the 80s or 90s.

Think about the differences in the environment:<p>80s: databases, programming, administration, networks ... that&#x27;s what you did with computers, and nobody did this yet. Computers were the future and parents wanted their kids to know the future, a computer. Only thing to do ? Developing, and later administration.<p>Today: cell phones, games and ADS ADS ADS. Distractions, ADS, LOOK HERE, ADS, ADS, ADS. Everything is a computer, and actual computers (the ones you can actually program) are the past, not the future, and they won&#x27;t come back.<p>Oh and by the way, to develop for those ADS ADS ADS computer&#x2F;&quot;phone&quot;, you need either a $1200+ machine (ie. a macbook), or a $800+ machine (one that can reasonably run the android emulator + full IDE, which is bloody heavy, more if you want it in laptop form).

That&#x27;s because computers today have a million times more possibilities, especially if connected to the internet.<p>The lucky few nerds that had access to a computer back when (and keep in mind it was very much a luxury device with limited use for families) didn&#x27;t have that much else to do with it, compared to today.<p>I&#x27;d argue that &quot;today&#x27;s millennials&quot; (urgh) get to explore a lot more career and hobby opportunities than they would with computers back then. The computers back then were specialized devices for the elite and already technically inclined; today&#x27;s computers (and phones, etc) are for everyone.

The main problem with programming is that it is seemingly useless as a hobby. I have been programming for many years and am quite experienced, yet I never managed to keep it up consistently because programming project ideas were either way too complicated requiring hours of research, or really boring. The main issue with programming as a hobby is coming up with realistic and non-tedious projects to do.

When personal computers was becoming commonplace and we kids were eager to learn all about them, I thought that, in the future, everyone would be computer literate, due to having had computers around already since childhood. Somehow, I overestimated people.

My elementary school kids are told about CodeMonkey in school, and they play with it a bit, but it is just so sad to see them exposed to coding in a task oriented, graded system, as opposed to the way I was introduced to coding in school, with Logo.

I was one of those kids who started with BASIC at age 8 in the 80s.... and I really disagree with modern scripting languages being more difficult. They have more things you can do, but it isn’t harder to make a simple program.

There is also a lot of Degree-ism these days compared to 1970s.<p>Back then anyone could give-it-a-go at any point. Many fewer people expected to go to university.<p>These days people anticipate the degree requirements of employers, a self fulfilling cycle

I noticed that as well. It seems strange to me considering computers are a lot more accessible now. Back then there was no Internet, YouTube, blogs, etc, to learn. Just the occasional reference manual.

I still remember programming in Basic in early to mid 80&#x27;s. Making a maze program with warp holes was pretty cool<p>Today people would probably laugh at this, but it was fun for me and others in the class

Well, we had no choice and it was really in our faces to get involved. Nowadays you can be entertained by a computer endlessly without having any real idea of how it works.

I started in 1981 when I was 15 on an Apple ][. This was in Germany and I was a tiny minority, most kids didn&#x27;t start until late high-school or early university.

Thanks to my trusty Atari 800 in 1981 I learned to program through magazine articles and books and experimenting with code at home. It was a great experience.

My first programming experience was on a computer with software loaded from tape drives. The Commodore 64 was a speedy step up from that!

Maybe kids today are focused more on &quot;disrupting&quot; markets rather than take a step back and learn how to program those tools in order to disrupt.

I would imagine that people who learn to program earlier are more like native speakers. As we know age is very important when we acquire natural languages

That, honestly, wasn&#x27;t programming. It was very small scale tinkering, or copying programs out of listings. Or typing the command to load a tape.

Shouldn&#x27;t it be &quot;Gen X kids&quot;? I thought that &quot;millennial&quot; referred to the generation born during the 80s and 90s.

The problem is today&#x27;s games are too complex. I started at 8 because I thought I could make better games.

<p><pre><code> 10 PRINT “HELLO!” 20 GOTO 10 </code></pre> I’ll just leave that there for a bit more 80’s nostalgia.

That was me with and BASIC and QBASIC. I wrote my own metronome so I wouldn&#x27;t have to buy one!

I&#x27;ve started with 8. VIC20 BASIC.

I started at age 10 on a ZX81 when the only realistic way to code was in machine-code by typing in hex (it did have BASIC, but nobody used it because it was too slow)