Why is Programming Fun?
I found this blurb to be a very nice articulation of some things I have said out loud and on this blog. I identify most with the last section of the quote, the close relationship of programming to pure thought.
I remember sitting down to the old Apple IIe one day and learning to type HGR to switch to high-resolution graphics mode. The screen made this sort of green (the only option) fleeting blizzard of static as the primitive video hardware switched to higher precision processing. I didn’t know enough to do anything while in HGR, but getting that strange screen blip felt like I was dealing with something that had power, namely the power of capability.
I was always enamored when a program wrote to disk, because the I/O blocked and the computer got stuck for a while. This was long before multitasking, so this was not a big deal. Delay to me always meant something was actually going on in there according to my direction but not being actuated by me at the time. It separated the computer from the Alfie or Etch-A-Sketch or Talking Battleship or whatever other fancy toys were out there.
I think the reason kids do so well with computers is that they are fundamentally unaware of their capability. They are a gaming system, just like a pile of wood blocks, a fridge box, or an Xbox. Computers just have more rules and are more fragile.
In other words, kids buy the lie that there really are windows that “close” and “open.” And you drag a file to move it from one place to another. Adults see too much of this as encoded action. They don’t let the model tell them what to do intuitively, because they’re working outside the model to start.