Ask HN: Is there a modern “power on to basic” computer, for kids to learn on?

>All of these are explicit design choices, for example a fixed palette is important to give games a "Pico-8" look and also reduce decisions regarding color choice.

Indeed, which is why they won't change, which is why (for me) an alternative like TIC-80 is preferable to waiting around for Pico-8 to become what I wish it were.

The virtual console space is tantalizing, but the culture around it has different tastes from mine. For example,

>I don't like it (or any of the other fantasy console\pico-8 clones) quite as much as Pico-8 because they remove constraints

This is a pretty common sentiment on the Pico-8 boards; I understand there are people looking for a certain aesthetic thrill that comes from working within the constraints to make something unexpectedly cool. And yes, when I have time, I would like to make e.g. a metroidvania that uses individual tiles to encode 4x4 chunks of tiles to allow for a big-ass map. It just so happens that those constraints aren't necessary for, and sometimes are in tension with, the goals of a good first-coding-experience learning environment.

I also totally understand why virtual consoles almost all use BASIC or lua, but (for me, not for my kids) I wish there were an option with static types. The combination of not being able to see much code on the screen at once plus no static type checking is pretty uncomfortable for me.

My ideal pallete would consist of all the C64s colors and all the ZX Spectrums colors combined. A few of them would overlap, and the resulting pallete would be restrictive but pixel artists could work magic between both the familiar old hues.

My ideal machine would be a C64 and Spectrum combined, 4 commodore sound chips, screen resolution increased only about 50%, 256kB ram, possibility of running 6502 and z80 in parallel, at quadruple speed.

Could be just nostalgia, but the continuing demo scene for these computers is incredible[a] and beautiful new games also get made to the old frugal specifications.

[a]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UN2HHVScUw

I understand, in a sense, what you mean (since I am of an earlier generation than the one which learned programming on that particular platform), but why should that necessarily be true? Hasn’t it always been the case that the current generation skips learning about useless lower layers used by older generations? How could it be that the layers you grew up are the special ones which are still useful, when all the layers which came before, which people at the time thought essential, have turned out not to be so?

I am, below, trying to imagine what an argument could be for any specific example to be worse than the previous ones.

One could make an argument that when the level of abstractions eliminate Turing completeness, they have eliminated an essential quality. (But this does not even eliminate Swift playground, I think, so in this case it does not apply.)

Or one could make an argument about a lack of program interconnectedness, which, I am given to understand, is very much a problem in modern smartphone and tablet environments. But I could be out of date and/or misinformed. Nevertheless, it would be a reasonable argument (and I don’t know if it applies to Swift playground on an iPad or not).

Very constrained environments, like Minecraft, can also be argued against on practical grounds – it’s simply too difficult to make something useful within them. Not technically impossible, just too difficult once you get up a bit in abstraction levels. In my opinion, this argument also applies, sadly, to BASIC: The lack of functions and other methods of abstractions is, I think, a killer.

Or one could argue (which I think I personally favor doing) that software freedom for end users is an essential quality which must never be lost, for reasons which are only tangentially based on what is good for learning. It is almost special pleading, but has its own reasons for doing so, and the logic, on its own terms, is sound.

But none of these arguments are insurmountable by some theoretical device and environment which avoids any or all of these specific criticisms. Therefore, I think that any argument based solely on the age and abstraction level would not be valid.

Only if they don't have friends. I have a family member who tried that and failed miserably: not only are the kids computer illiterate (from not having any positive/useful exposure to technology when they were younger) but now they are hooked video games and social 'stuff' from their friends / school. The parents have now thrown in the towel and use technology as a pacifier for their adolescents. Just because you don't allow it at home, don't assume they're not getting it somewhere else.

Is this so new? 25 years ago kids were addicted to cable/phone/Genesis/VHS and never "had" to do any programming to have any fun, either.

There was a phase where people expected that people starting on iPhones even younger than people started on Windows in 1993 would make them more technologically literate, but that was optimistic - they're iPhone-literate to the same level kids then were Windows-literate.

Actually understanding things at the machine level was very rare back then, too, though.

Kids today have it difficult!

A real computer, by definition is something you can program.

Today you don't just find accessible devices meeting that requirement in the wild.

In the microcomputer era you pressed the power button and you had a REPL prompt.

Today there _is_ a computer hidden somewhere inside you laptop or mobile device, but you need to know where to dig to find it.

In the 80s a newly hatched geek just had to crawl over the beach sand until he reached a device and it was a computer.

Today's kids are surrounded by computers, but they are all deeply embedded in the devices around them.

After hatching, a modern geek needs someone needs to break the husk around their device to get at the computer first.

So your recipe is exactly the recipe for exposing him/her to a computer.

Kids like you had it way too easy. When I was young you had to solder your own components together to make a calculator.

Kids like me had it way too easy. When they were young they had to look things up in log tables and use slide rules.

Etc. back to hunting wild beasts and digging vegetables out of the frozen ground

Yes and no. I agree they have it too easy as users. But it is harder to start programming because of the complexity of the tooling. Also, achieving something cool in code can be a bigger stretch than it used to be. When the pinnacle of gaming was a text adventure, a kid could come close to emulating it with a few dozen lines of code. Now kids are playing Fortnight which is not replicable without a large team of coders, artists, and millions of dollars.

And it it will sit in a dusty pile in the corner

I've been thinking along those lines, with some external GPIO pins hooked up to toys and simple commands to control them. So the kid could type "ON 4" and the pin labeled 4 hooked up to a light would turn it on. Or "VOLUME 3" to set the volume of the sound output. File system commands like LS, CD, and PLAY <name> to play a music file to sound out. Maybe more commands that control RC channels where you have lots of flexibility on what you put on the other end.

But did you ever find it interesting/fun or was it always just a job? I suspect that the OP is trying to find a way to convey the fun they experienced getting into tech as a kid... either that or they're sadistic ;-)

Truestory. I graduated with EE degree and a few years after that I still get a kick out of making an LED, connected directly to my desktop printer port, blink on and off. Different strokes for different folks, yeah?

Or just use a language that doesn’t have that problem, then you don’t need a magic editor.

You did not mentioned if you teach python to kids, things that are intuitive to us are not for them, yesterday I was working with my son on Physics exercise, something like how much Km are 1234cm (we are using metric system here) and in all similar exercises he did everything reversed, like a few centimeters are a few millions of Km which is obvious absurd but it was not easy for me to make him understand(plus the teacher at school).

My point is that something that is obvious and simple for us for someone else makes no sense(he is 12 and I don't have experience teaching other children),

For now I gave up on teaching coding to him, maybe he needs to grow a bit more to understand the abstract thinking required.

I too regret staying for 12 years on GW/Visual Basic and never finding my path to C. How to start a programming career slowly...

>MO any introductory programming environment that doesn't let you do something like 10 PRINT BUTTS <RET> 20 GOTO 10 <RET> and get BUTTS BUTTS BUTTS... out of it is a failure to launch.

But Python doesn't let you do that - there's no goto...

While I'm being somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I do think it's true that

  while true:
    print("BUTTS")

carries quite a bit more conceptual overhead than the BASIC equivalent, and is not exactly a "very simple imperative syntax". You don't have the simplistic and obvious "goto" - instead you have the ungrammatical and obtuse "while true". And then there's the indentation, the colon, and the parentheses around the argument to print... all explainable of course, but all requiring explanation. To fully grok it you need to understand booleans and conditions, block structure, and function calls. Of course it's all perfectly obvious to experienced eyes but remember the mountain you have to climb when you're first starting out - more than one or two seemingly inexplicable things when you're first starting out can be very discouraging.

Worse, to my mind, is the loss of that small moment of enlightenment regarding complex behavior emerging from computer programs - with 10 PRINT BUTTS : 20 GOTO 10 you are composing two atomic, individually obvious statements to create something more - an infinite loop. When one of the statements is a slightly more complex line that essentially means "do an infinite loop", some of that magic is lost.

Thank you for the links , I will check/try Applab in weekend, I do not have iOS so I can't try the other app.

Also, one more thing, the Playground functionality on the iPad is great.

On Xcode it sucks (buggy, stops refreshing, etc.)

Kind of strange, because it's the same infrastructure...