This reminds me of a tweet from a while back: https://x.com/jonathoda/status/960952613507231744
My thesis: The theory and practice of programming is permeated with the sensibilities of high-functioning autistics like myself. De-nerding programming will unlock great benefits for all of humanity. We too will benefit, for despite our hubris we are also way over our heads.
> Compare to the 80s, when a child or teen's "game console" might have been a ZX Spectrum or Commodore 64, which would boot right to BASIC
Fully agreed here! I had a very unsettling conversation with a student interested in making video games. He was 18, and in a CS degree program, and he has told me he had been into video games his whole life, but he never knew you could use the computer he had at home growing up to make them.
This floored me because like you, I had experience booting up an old PC and having access to a programming language right there. Mine was QBasic on DOS, and I used it to make a rudimentary Zork type text adventure game. I was 6 or 7, and tons of people my age had that same experience getting into programming.
I would have thought in the 30 years since that time, with the proliferation of computing devices and especially game creation software, that it would be more accessible today to get into gaming. And in some ways it is, but in many ways it's also been heavily monetized and walled off, to the point that every day people are discouraged from creating their own games. It's really quite sad, because we've actually learned a lot over the years about how to make computing more accessible to people, but we haven't invested enough in putting that knowledge into real products that people use.