Comment by sublinear
1 day ago
I'm not a parent, but I think encouraging anything creative is probably just as good.
Half the fun was not knowing how to do something. There was no other way to satisfy curiosity than to tinker endlessly and constantly seek out information. Stumbling upon unusually good programs made it seem like anything was possible regardless of the machine it ran on. Video games and the demoscene were like that for me, and now any modern machine really can run almost anything.
Programming can still be fun like that, but often in the context of existing ideas. My parents had similar feelings about new music and cars. The sense of wonder decreases when the bar is raised. That's not to say there isn't a ton left to explore, but that's the impression when curiosity is too easily satisfied. You have to keep up and find new ways to stay curious. We consume way more than we create these days.
The New Yorker had a memorable single panel comic by David Sipress with an old man saying "everything was better back when everything was worse". I just had to mention it.
Same here.
I remember a large part of the fun was that we couldn't just look something up on the web - it didn't exist in our home in the eighties. Instead we'd pore over BASIC on floppies. Changing a thing, for example GRAVITY=0.1, and finding out the banana now flies almost straight up.
Or meticulously typing over the source code printed in hand-me-down magazines. Evenings of me and friend one typing the other reading out loud. Then way more evenings of finding all the typos and bugs. And then one or two evenings running the game we just "wrote" and get bored immediately. And start changing things.
This is how I learned programming and what has paid my bills for over 25 years now. There were few university careers for programming, but mostly, young-arrogant-me was like "well, I have learned myself programming, so I'd better follow a university program that teaches me stuff I don't already know XD".
The tinkering and creative part has been lost by now for me. I lament that. So I've put aside a fund, finishing off some contracts now and from this summer on, will do unpaid work of "creative coding". Making "art" with software - something I now do in spare time, fulltime. Because that tinkering is what drew me in. Not the scrum-rituals, spagetti-code-wrangling or layers of architectural enterprise abstractions. But the fun of nesting nested loops and seeing my name fly over the screen in weird patterns, or the joy of making the matrix printer play a "song" by letting it print weird ascii strings.
When I was kid thinking about this as a career, I knew what I was getting into. I had the internet (when it was a lot smaller). I had seen big tech flop hard. I saw companies like Apple for what they were before and after their iDevices. By the time I was wrapping up my CS degree I had seen social media destroy itself and legacy media, the rise of web 2.0, SaaS startups, mobile apps, etc.
I've been working professionally now for over a decade, but got started long before that as a child. Despite the endless negative things I could say about the modern era, I don't feel like any of it impacts my enjoyment of my work or gets in the way of my creativity.
I think this is because the closest I've ever been to truly being alone with the machine is writing programs for my TI calculators, but even then I still had ticalc.org. Some programs on there were brilliant, but most were awful. It was the perfect balance for people my age at the time. Despite what people believe today, especially with their LLMs, I don't think the landscape has changed much in that regard. There's still a lot of awful code with few brilliant examples. That leaves room for me to work on new interesting stuff or improve what's there without having too much help spoiling it.