Hindsight is always 20/20 and I probably should have had my friend teach me. The problem is that this friend has/had Asperger's syndrome so teaching (involving a degree of empathising with others) was not a natural strong suit for him. For some reason I just kind of assumed that I didn't have the aptitude for programming which in hindsight seems silly now. It can be an advantage for a child to grow up with friends or relatives from a computing background who can teach them.
As much as there are potential benefits which were had in the 80's with simpler computing or computing which required higher level of knowledge and understanding to make it work there are advantages which young people have today which we didn't have. The likes of Netbeans and Eclipse are available for free (and even the Express editions of Visual Studio). As much as computers may not be bundled with development tools, the fact that good quality tools exist and are downloadable for free is a very different landscape from the 80's As I wasn't really programming properly until later I cannot speak for exactly how conditions were. I think that even though C was available, due to constraints of the Z80 based micro computers many things like games were written in assembler. Were any C compilers or tools available for free back then? I recall the 80's and early 90's as involving having to buy expensive tools to do that kind of thing. There was a financial barrier to entry to have high quality tools. Things like C/C++ compilers would perhaps have been available at a local College (Community College is the equivalent believe in America) but I don't know many would have such tools at home. I can remember once my friend had his Acorn Archimedes 3010 and we played around with game development. I tended to do all the pixel art for the games he worked on (but usually never quite finished due to limited attention span). He would program in BASIC but the performance especially when it came to things like graphics was limiting. I had suggested perhaps he could move to something like C but I think he said he could get hold of free C compilers but that these did not include any libraries and that to do anything really useful required some libraries. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
