I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
Teenagers these days grow up with a phone instead of MSDOS or a C64 and how will they ever learn to tinker? How can we transition from play to programming, allowing people to create their own games, like in the old days you could play on a MUD or MUSH (I liked MUSHes better!) and from text adventure to community to programming it had everything. And I want the same thing for the web and messaging. People writing bots. People writing CGI scripts or whatever. I want it all! I want it now!
@kensanata that said, it doesn't offer much in the direction of networking and interacting with others, so that is an open challenge for sure.
@technomancy Well, I told my friend about #Bussard where you play by programming in various languages and interact with the world using various interfaces and I was very enthusiastic and he was interested! I really should try and write a sub plot with missions for it, Skyrim style!
@kensanata I've thought about just turning it into an engine that you can write mods for; wouldn't be too difficult actually! but I'd need to do a bunch more documentation.
@technomancy Or we could just really jam with code and mission writing! We just need to find the time. I don’t really want to write mission-mods in my nerd cave all by myself. 😀
@kensanata I have a lot of thoughts on this; we should talk on Freenode
@kensanata I think (hope?) that the worst days are behind us when it comes to kids not having a good path from play to programing. We went through a period where everything was locked down, windows or console gaming, no real customization in sight. But now, with easy robotics, Raspberry Pis, and competitive programing, it really feels like things have turned a corner. Even MineCraft feels like a step in the right direction, though not as far as a Pi robot
@codesections True, I had forgotten about Minecraft and the like.
@codesections @kensanata
there's still the step of convincing your parents to buy you a RasPi.
@codesections @kensanata
Also, I think phones and tablets are a big problem. They have no keyboard, no user-servicable parts... they are optimized for consumption.
@Wolf480pl @codesections Yeah. And doing the Rasbian install or whatever you need.
@kensanata @codesections can't you order it with a pre-imaged card tho?
@kensanata @codesections looks like you can buy a pre-imaged card separately
@codesections @kensanata The problem is that those are not "real". They are toys designed for teaching, and you won't be able to make anything that looks and works like a modern website or game with them.
@deshipu @kensanata I don't know. I mean, you couldn't build anything that looks like a modern website on an early PC/microcomputer either, but people learned fine. And the Pi at least is pretty capable; I have one that's running a few Git repos, a NextCloud server, a PiHole ad blocker, and a print server without really breaking a sweat.
(I'm not suggesting that those are good projects for kids necessarily, just saying that they have surprising power)
@codesections @kensanata Back then you could easily make things that looked the same, if not better, as any "official" or "professional" thing you could see. Mostly because that's also how those were made.
Today the "real" things are build from layers upon layers of automation and libraries, often, in the case of web, not publicly available (though open source helps here somewhat). The people who build them don't understand them themselves. How can they teach anything?
@codesections @kensanata Writing a commercial game for Atari or Commondore took a single developer a week or two. A dedicated teenager with time on their hands could (and sometimes did) run loops around those. Today a "normal" computer game takes a year for hundreds of people, with a budget of a Hollywood movie. It's like teaching to play a tinwhistle someone who habitually listens to symphonies. They will never get even close.
@deshipu @codesections hm. How much programming is there is mods for Skyrim and the like? Perhaps that’s an intermediate step?
@kensanata @codesections I was paid for the first website that I made. Nobody is going to pay you for a skyrim mod.
@kensanata @codesections Also, Skyrim is closed and owned by a company. They control it, and they decide what to do with any "user generated content" they harvest.
@deshipu @kensanata @codesections ehhhh. i think things are in bad shape in a number of important ways right now, but i came up in the 90s hacking on toy-level stuff (old BASICs, TI calculators, hypercard stacks, irc client scripting langs) in a moment that had become pretty hostile to end-user programming and have done ok since.
we probably shouldn't underestimate how important it is just to have _some_ gateway.
@deshipu @kensanata @codesections like, for all the stuff we justly lament from that time, i also remember being _desperate_ for access to a real compiler of some kind in that time before widespread network access and the rise of gnu & linux. i could have found tools earlier if i'd known what i needed, but i was a kid in the boonies with almost no connections to programming culture and no idea where to find them.
some things these days really are better.
@brennen @deshipu @codesections definitely! I was sooooo happy when I finally got SuSE 4.4 or whatever it was to run on my desktop with 4MB of RAM. Had to buy extra RAM to get X11!
@brennen @kensanata @codesections I don't like the idea that only very dedicated, lucky and thick-skinned people get to contribute to my area of expertise. That stops the progress and makes all ideas the same boring things, because there are so few people coming up with them and they are all so similar to each other.
If you ask me, I will keep looking for ways to make it easier for more people to contribute in a meaningful way. It's not enough that there is *some* way.
@deshipu @kensanata @codesections i in no way disagree with that sentiment.
@kensanata about learning to tinker: my younger siblings (both in highschool) are basically computer illiterate. They can use iPhones and OSX...that's about it. I have a feeling that's about par for the course these days.
@Elmkast sadly so!
@kensanata there’s some fun stuff out there like the pico-8: https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
Separately: I think with phones, it’s hard because the hardware is all closed, integrated, proprietary. I remember part of the reason my friends and I used to tinker when we were kids was because we were pretty poor but trying to assemble the coolest machine we could from the parts we could scrounge. I imagine it would be a different world if you could build a phone out of components the way you can build a pc.
@kensanata that said I think phones are a crazy untapped potential for p2p in dense areas. My phone has some stupid storage on it, more than enough for it to be part of a bluetooth or WiFi p2p network as I go through my daily life...
@brook Yeah. I just wonder how we could take advantage of that.
@kensanata I don’t know. I feel like it comes with open phone hardware and software. I don’t feel like we’re that far away anymore, what with component availability, things like the pi zero, and sort of experimental things like the pi-phone. But we’ve gone pretty far down the closed / proprietary rabbit hole, so it’s going to be difficult to dig back out. Guess it won’t happen until we make it happen. Meaning, I should put down this iphone, stop talking, and start building ...
@brook Maybe. Sadly, that seems like a thing of the future. A few years or a decade at least before phones reach the steady states laptops have reached, for example. Right now the fact that kids are acculturated using closed platforms like tablets and phones is a major problem, I think.
@kensanata I for my part ended up trying things out with my phone, a good old Galaxy S3. Dunno if you wanna call installing CyanogenMod "tinkering", but four years ago, that was quite an adventure for me. But it got me started with computers and stuff. I didn't know much about this back then, just followed random guides online, and at multiple points thought I'd bricked it. I slept over it, spend a few more hours the next day research and was able to fix it again.
@Nuntius That is a an excellent counter argument. Parents should give their teenage kids phones that can be jail-broken!
@kensanata I think the opportunites are still out there. With cheap Android phones or arduinos and raspis you got both the software and hardware side covered. I'm more the SW person, but I know people who tinkered with the arduino a lot. I guess it comes down to your own curiosity and commitment of how much you wanna do.
@Nuntius I see a few people at the office interested in arduinos, or making modules for modular synthesizers and the like. It’s much rarer than C64s when I was young though, and it seems to be the same people and not their kids? But perhaps that’s my selection bias of course.
@kensanata I don't have a solid answer, but I feel like Minecraft is a good place to start. It's not tinkering with an OS, but it can teach programming concepts that might help them discover an interest in how computers work and move on to things outside of the game.
@john I agree! Specially because you can write Python code to build stuff I heard. That sounded really promising. Perhaps that was Raspberry Pi only?
@kensanata I'm not sure! I hope that's the case, because writing a plugin for the Java version would be daunting for a newbie.
@john Sounds daunting to me and I’m a Java dev. 😀
@kensanata That makes me feel better. I remember having a lot of trouble attempting a very basic Minecraft plugin a couple of years ago, as a non-Java dev.
@kensanata Are you familiar with Scratch and other visual-based programming languages where you build algorithms visually?
@QContinuumHypothesis I've had a teenager demonstrate his game written in Scratch, showing me the source code and all that. Scratch is great.
@kensanata I hope that https://tic.computer can become the next QBasic
(except without the whole "not a good programming language" part)