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 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?
@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 I'm not sure! I hope that's the case, because writing a plugin for the Java version would be daunting for a newbie.