Post 2733352 by alis@fandom.ink
(DIR) More posts by alis@fandom.ink
(DIR) Post #2733351 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-06T22:46:34Z
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People become what they can imagine becoming, & access to tools has as much to do with this as representation. If it's easy to fall into programming accidentally, then it's easy to imagine yourself programming regularly.
(DIR) Post #2733352 by alis@fandom.ink
2019-01-06T23:07:05Z
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@enkiv2 This is essentially how the early 2000s "girl web" personal blog scene worked. People (including your truly) would start with doing a little bit of HTML/CSS/PHP to make templates for their pre-canned CMS on their CPanel shared hosted provider, and move from there into more complex coding/infrastructure/whatever, because they saw other people in the scene do the same (and usually write tutorials for it while they were at it).
(DIR) Post #2733353 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-06T23:20:09Z
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@alis I saw a lot of this kind of stuff with web tech before around 2006. When I was in elementary school I literally learned HTML from a book I got from my school book fair, and by the time MySpace appeared a lot of people were learning HTML & CSS in order to customize their pages.
(DIR) Post #2733354 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-06T23:22:04Z
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@alis I also saw this a bit with 8-bit micros, although I'm too young to have experienced it firsthand. I knew somebody who got one at a yard sale, & he was nontechnical, but he taught himself BASIC just to screw around. I already knew some BASIC, & taught somebody else at school who was running Windows 95 (and thus had qbasic already installed). That guy now works at spotify.
(DIR) Post #2733355 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-06T23:25:00Z
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@alis It used to be that books on programming in BASIC were a staple of school libraries, school book fairs, & childrens' sections at public libraries. A lot of kids had computers that just ran BASIC, & would be interested in casually grabbing a book to type in games from or learn how to impress their friends. The casualness with which people pick up programming, even as they have more access to computers, is plummetting.
(DIR) Post #2733356 by drzaiusx11@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T01:17:07Z
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@enkiv2 @alis my partner is a teacher and runs a makerspace on campus to expose more kids to programming through art, making videogames, etc. I don't know how prevalent programs like that are but there are folks out trying to make programming part of the curriculum. It's a popular class; it always has a wait list (it's an elective.)
(DIR) Post #2733357 by Truck@icosahedron.website
2019-01-07T09:48:26Z
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@drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @alis It's "sort of" the idea behind the raspberry pi - make a commodity computer that kids could afford (in the UK) with pocket money, make an infrastruture upon it that encouraged creativity and learning (which was done via scratch and minecraft, and I guess mathematica?)It also still exists in the demoscene, but sadly, the demoscene seems to be considered "something old people did once" and "omg that is so hard I'll never be able to do that" of which NEITHER is the case.
(DIR) Post #2733358 by Truck@icosahedron.website
2019-01-07T09:51:53Z
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@drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @alis actually, come to think of it, Ludum Dare approaches this as well... loads of people all around the globe just go in and do something in 48 hours, making a game.Loads of people try it out, find some friends, and continue ...though I think some of the collaboration and friendship is going away as people move toward using non-community chat networks/voice networks. irc, jabber, etc were all good as they were PUBLIC and SOCIAL; knowledge was shared.
(DIR) Post #2733359 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-07T11:04:55Z
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@Truck @alis @drzaiusx11 There are definitely other folks trying to compensate for this trend. But, overall, it used to be that if you had access to a home computer there was the basic expectation that you'd dabble in programming a little bit & that doing so wasn't scary, & as home computers proliferated that stopped being the norm. (Some people claim that this is because 90% of users simply *can't* type code in from a book or wrap their head around the concept, & I don't believe that.)
(DIR) Post #2733360 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-07T11:08:03Z
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@Truck @alis @drzaiusx11 More specifically: once upon a time, programming is what you *did* with home computers (aside from playing video games), even if your age was in the single digits. The expectation that all computer users would be amenable to learning a little bit of programming -- that programming would be normal among non-programmers the same way using a screwdriver is among non-carpenters -- has gone away & we've mystified programming as something only aspiring programmers do.
(DIR) Post #2733361 by enkiv2@eldritch.cafe
2019-01-07T11:10:53Z
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@Truck @alis @drzaiusx11 (Of course, this isn't true in professional settings. Linguists, physicists, and statisticians regularly write code. It's probably common in other fields I'm not aware of. You don't need to want to be a programmer or even be good at programming in order to benefit from rudimentary programming skills.)
(DIR) Post #2733485 by clacke@libranet.de
2019-01-07T11:46:30Z
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@enkiv2 @Truck @alis @drzaiusx11 Anyone can type in those lines that a lot of people typed in at the time, from magazines:2030 DATA 1234,2354,1234,456,5467,23,2345,58,345,42,58,12342040 DATA 3432314,5467,546,234,567,354,1234,4367,7,67,2345Now, this was monotonic work, it didn't teach you the slightest bit about assembler or binaries or what registers were or how that code actually redirects the interrupts and sets up a game engine.Not everyone did anything more than that, just run the pre-made thing and enjoy it, without digging any deeper.But by typing those opaque and arcane lines, running the program, and running SYS 12345 and see magic happen on the screen, you had invited yourself into the circle, and it made you wish you knew what those lines actually were, and maybe a more initiated friend told you that the 456 on line 2030 could be changed to change the color of the border in the start animation, and you started to see that the magic wasn't so magic, and it wasn't scary.And maybe you understood what the initial FOR loop of POKEs actually did, at some level, and that invited you to get a book to learn more.
(DIR) Post #2733490 by clacke@libranet.de
2019-01-07T11:47:31Z
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I'd say binaries distributed as BASIC text lines both mystified and demystified machine code.
(DIR) Post #2734124 by vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de
2019-01-07T11:50:16Z
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@Truck @drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @alis AFAIK the entire idea of the RPi was to regain the once relatively high level of basic computer science education most British schoolchildren had at least some access to in the 1980s, helped by along by the availability of the BBC Micro/Archimedes.Its not doing too badly in this respect, but runs the risk (similar to the Arc) of being seen as something to do with "school" and not as appealing to young adults (other than techies, Gen X'ers and parents) >>
(DIR) Post #2734138 by vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de
2019-01-07T11:54:22Z
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@Truck @drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @alis in hindsight this is exactly what happened to the Archimedes and other Acorn machines (which were very good computers for the era) so in early 90s they lost out in market share for multimedia projects to the Atari ST and Amiga, and these all disappeared around the same time leaving a market gap until PC's caught up and it was around this time the culture of coding/programming seemed to decline here in the UK (I think it still held out in mainland Europe)
(DIR) Post #2734143 by alva@mastodon.social
2019-01-06T23:36:34Z
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@enkiv2 @alis I got to use a C64 when I was really young. I didn't even know what programming was, but on that machine, you'd switch it on, and within 3 seconds, you were at a prompt that would accept BASIC code. I typed in some snippets from magazines, to see what would happen. I could change the colours with one line. It was so immediate; zero things to install, just switch it on and type something.
(DIR) Post #2737491 by gcupc@glitch.social
2019-01-07T14:40:48Z
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@clacke @drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @Truck @alis I'll admit that while I did learn BASIC on my VIC20, I never learned what the POKE and PEEK statements did (other than crash the computer if you entered them randomly rather than copying them in from the magazine).
(DIR) Post #2737500 by clacke@libranet.de
2019-01-07T14:49:22Z
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monotonous*
(DIR) Post #2743212 by drzaiusx11@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T12:14:49Z
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@Truck @enkiv2 @alis it doesn't help that baremetal on modern arm chips with gpus aren't much of a thing because of undocumented hardware and binary blobs.
(DIR) Post #2743213 by drzaiusx11@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T14:36:58Z
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@Truck @enkiv2 @alis that said, i've been having fun programming my RPi baremetal (gpu boot seq as been reverse engineered to allow this): https://github.com/bztsrc/raspi3-tutorial
(DIR) Post #2743252 by vertigo@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T17:08:13Z
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@enkiv2 @alis It's always baffled me how Raspberry Pi foundation can justify making a platform that encourages exploration, but then layers heaps of opaque layers of software expressly designed to forbid that kind of poking around on top (e.g., Linux). It defeats the whole purpose.This is why my #Kestrel3 project boots into Forth. Maximum access to the machine without resorting straight to assembly language.
(DIR) Post #2743253 by vertigo@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T17:14:01Z
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@enkiv2 @alis Half the fun of making discoveries is being able to crash the computer when you make a mistake. And I really do mean "the" computer as a whole. Likewise, you need an environment that comes up in seconds at the *slowest* to recover. Linux is neither of these things.It's great that the Pi has Linux as an option. But it's not really good as a beginner's learning environment, in my opinion.
(DIR) Post #2743254 by vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de
2019-01-07T17:34:06Z
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@vertigo @enkiv2 @alis RISCOS is still there, and still maintained! its a pity that its mostly forgotten about/overlooked by anyone below the age of 40 (and the older UI with unusual naming conventions might scare off users too, I must admit when I briefly tried it I had quite forgotten that the . was used as a directory separator rather than / (amongst other things) and gave up with trying to use it further (maybe one day I will give it another go?)
(DIR) Post #2743255 by vertigo@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T17:39:30Z
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@vfrmedia @enkiv2 @alis Not having used RISC OS before (but I *do* use ROX-Filer on Linux!), much less coded for it, my opinion here might be misinformed.RISC OS, much like AmigaOS and Atari TOS, would be where I'd draw the line in terms being beginner-friendly. I'd probably consider them more intermediate environments (especially AmigaOS). Yes, you can still touch raw hardware, but doing so is generally discouraged for fear of disrupting the rest of the operating system environment.
(DIR) Post #2743256 by vfrmedia@social.tchncs.de
2019-01-07T17:57:42Z
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@vertigo @enkiv2 @alis This is true, although interestingly Acorn was one of the first platforms where directly accessing the memory mapped hardware directly was often discouraged (other than for speed critical use cases like gaming) in favour of going via the operating system (eg OSBYTE and OSWORD in BBC Basic)
(DIR) Post #2743737 by bhtooefr@cathoderay.tube
2019-01-07T19:12:03.628602Z
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@vfrmedia @alis @enkiv2 @vertigo Could also look at CP/M, where everything called the BIOS/BDOS instead of directly accessing hardware as well, for that.(And the Apple II had I/O redirection for the text console and keyboard, too.)
(DIR) Post #2743936 by bhtooefr@cathoderay.tube
2019-01-07T19:20:09.933940Z
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@vfrmedia @alis @enkiv2 @vertigo (Of course, CP/M also wasn't trying to be like the home computers as far as "you boot into the OS, and your command line interface is BASIC".)
(DIR) Post #2760409 by drzaiusx11@mastodon.social
2019-01-07T01:40:10Z
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@enkiv2 @alis personally, I learned programming through picking up random (and dated) books at thrift shops. But I've been exposed to programming since 4th grade when they taught "logo" in class on some shitty old apples in the school's basement. That was in the 90s. Shit I'm old.
(DIR) Post #2763150 by alanz@social.coop
2019-01-07T16:22:17Z
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@clackeExcept in my experience you always made at least one typo, and the learning came from trying to get the thing to work.@drzaiusx11 @enkiv2 @Truck @alis