From whytheluckystiff on Advogato, we find The Little Coder's Predicament:
In the 1980s, you could look up from your Commodore 64, hours after purchasing it, with a glossy feeling of empowerment, achieved by the pattern of notes spewing from the speaker grille in an endless loop. You were part of the movement to help machines sing! You were a programmer! The Atari 800 people had BASIC. They know what I'm talking about. And the TI-994A guys don't need to say a word, because the TI could say it for them!
This does make me wonder.
When I got my first computer (a Commodore 64), home computers were essentially run in one of two modes. In one mode, they were games machines, and occasionally ran really primitive productivity applications1. In the other mode, they accepted BASIC programs. Because games were quite expensive, and it was hard to convince our parents that we really needed them, a lot of us discovered programming in those gaps where we wanted a break from playing Attack of the Mutant Camels
The languages that an interested soul could download and learn today are so much more advanced than we had back then. A child of the noughties could download Python, Java, Squeak or Ruby for any platform they desire, and with their ubiquitous Internet connections, could write much more interesting first programs than the one my brother wrote back in 1984 to calculate his pocket money. Now, though, programming is no longer a ubiquitous part of the computing environment. It isn't the default mode the computer starts up in any more. Its an option you must seek out.
Maybe this is just a sign my generation has finally left ‘youth’. “Those kids of today just don't understand...” and all that. I'm sure the generation before me bemoaned the fact that I didn't have to solder my computer together from parts, or write my own bootstrap code before it did anything.
After all, from my own point of view while programming was always around in my childhood, almost all of it was Basic (which is often considered a disease that can't be recovered from2), and most of it was done by my brother. He programmed, I looked over his shoulder until he got annoyed with me. I much preferred playing games. I didn't write a serious line of code on my own until I was nineteen; and that was in Perl, on the Linux installation I had installed because I'd discovered the Internet and wanted to know more about that Unix thing.
And now, a few years later, I'm unmistakably a computer nerd. (and my brother who did all the coding is now a journalist, playwright, and a hell of a lot cooler than me).
So, perhaps the Little Coder's Predicament isn't as bad as an old-school hacker might think3.
1 Some people had those boring IBM PC things that ran spreadsheets but didn't have a joystick port. We pitied them until about 1990, when they started getting all the good games, and our last hope (the Amiga) was falling behind. My household's first PC arrived solely because my brother wanted to play Ultima Underworld.
2 Edsger Dijkstra: “It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.”
3 On the other hand, I may be being a little presumptive. Maybe old-school hackers point at me and say “Oh God. This guy is the future of programming? Barf.”.
