The big difference is that in 1980s, we had no choice. If I wanted to play games I had to learn how to use this new TI99/4A. Back to those cartridges were in limited number and my time was kind of infinite (it seemed looking back ;) ). So I started to borrow books and copy listings, then started to understand basic and finally tried to adapt the gameplay etc...
I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined!
He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it.
But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
I don't buy it - your kid may just not be into programming as much as you were. I was born in '83 and in the 90s (when I got into computers) QBasic was already well buried in some obscure directory inside DOS (or later the windows 95 installation CD) & with all the piracy there was no shortage of games around.
I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though.
In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that.
It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
MS languages had great "online" (i.e. integrated in the IDE) help, you could learn programming from the QBasic/QuickBasic integrated help alone. Visual Basic also had great integrated help.
We also had Logo classes at primary school but I never "got" that you can actually program with logo, it seemed like a silly drawing program to me at the time.
I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined!
He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it.
But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!