Marc LeBrun wrote:
For example, my son quite reasonably had zero interest in the baroqueries of HTML until I showed him how he could edit the sources of actual pages he browsed to get silly variants. Soon he wanted to craft his own "cool" home page.
I learned programming on a Commodore Vic 20; I was eight or ten. There were a bunch of BASIC games on tapes we'd load and run. My dad must have shown me the LIST command; when the maze for Pac-Man scrolled by, editing it was the most natural thing in the world. The ghosts wandered up and got caught in the score. On Donkey Kong, I moved the princess off the edge of the platform (unfinished building? what was that thing?) so we had to fling ourselves off the edge and tumble flailing into the princess. Scott Adams (not Dilbert) wrote a bunch of text advenure games. Our family loved solving the puzzles together. When I tried writing one, I found it awkward to recode the command interpreter for each room. GOSUB was a blessed revelation. Eventually my adventure needed the 20k expander card to fit in memory. I learned binary by hand-coding the pixels of the monochrome graphics. When that got tiresome, I figured out how to scrape the screen and convert an 8x8 array of characters into a sprite. I copied & tweaked the fractal programs from Scientific American's Computer Recreations columns. This led into a lot more maths: what the heck does z^z mean when z is complex? My teacher didn't know, but she gave me an article on exp(i theta) that answered the question and opened up a lot more neat stuff. Most languages have shortcomings, but it won't stop anyone if they're having fun. -- Mike Stay staym@clear.net.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~msta039