Thursday, March 23, 2006

Hobby Games Programmers

I couldn't agree more with this.
As I have noted before, I started programming on an Amstrad in the 80's when I was a kid.

Programming in those days meant making a crude game. The article above makes a good point, "But, sadly, current versions of Windows have no immediately accessible programming languages. And what’s a kid going to do with Visual Basic? Build a modal dialog?".

I have never really thought about this before. What do youngsters do today to get started? I know they *could* download C# or VBExpress for free and download DirectX SDK for free, but its not by any means easy - even for a professional developer. I can't imagine a young programmer being that interested in learning programming by making a Windows App.

I guess they could get into making Web Apps in ASP.NET or php etc and I would think that would be something I would do if I were 15 years younger and starting out.

Even then things ain't as easy as they were 15-20 years ago. In that respect it seems things have taken a backward step?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't think it's the lack of a builtin language that's holding kids back from coding. After all, every machine has HTML & Javascript.

I think the reason much more kids back then got in to coding vs kids now, is kids now have much better games.

Anonymous said...

i'm thirteen, and i started with html, js etc, and have graduated to vcexpress. but i agree, only about 2 of my friends understands a word i say.