What? Trying to get kids on board programming with Z80 assembly? Honestly, I don't see how you can think that kids will be able to create games by being thrust into the waters of assembly language. I mean, yes, it is, technically possible, but do you realize that as children develop, they are visual learners and become bored of things quickly?
Back in the days of the Commodore 64s (and for me and some others, Color Computers), when those machines were among the top of the line for the typical home hardware market, the included BASIC language was easy to learn and didn't bring the system screaming to a halt for some miscalculation in logic or refuse to start as a result of a syntax error that existed somewhere later down in the code. This was the time when computers were first starting to become accepted in the home, and the wealth of prewritten software we have now wasn't there, and so people wanted the ability to write their own for little tasks, in a language approachable to both adults and children alike.
Nowadays, most people use computers without any knowledge of operating systems, much less programming. Computers no longer come with a BASIC interpreter, and even if they did, most kids now hold higher expectations for what computers can do and what games should be able to do. I certainly don't mind playing around with some of those old games from the 8-bit days, blocky appearance and all, but kids today haven't lived long enough to develop a nostalgia for those. The original style of BASIC isn't going to cut it, and assembly? I honestly cannot imagine any child picking up a book for assembly language, having done no previous tinkering with programming, and hacking out a game complete with the bells and whistles of sound and graphics.
You don't learn how to swim without first testing the waters and getting a feel for floating and paddling around, and you don't learn programming without first having played around in a safe environment that doesn't intimidate you with error messages picking apart syntax. Maybe you did, but I know I didn't. Scratch, or maybe other visual programming languages that enable use of modern media in a safe environment, could very well be the new generation's BASIC.
Porting current, probably complicated and difficult to rewrite from scratch, applications written in VB.net over to Linux? I'd like to hear how the library support is, though. That seems a bit peculiar to me, but I don't know much about Mono either.
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He settled down and had a kid.
What? Trying to get kids on board programming with Z80 assembly? Honestly, I don't see how you can think that kids will be able to create games by being thrust into the waters of assembly language. I mean, yes, it is, technically possible, but do you realize that as children develop, they are visual learners and become bored of things quickly?
Back in the days of the Commodore 64s (and for me and some others, Color Computers), when those machines were among the top of the line for the typical home hardware market, the included BASIC language was easy to learn and didn't bring the system screaming to a halt for some miscalculation in logic or refuse to start as a result of a syntax error that existed somewhere later down in the code. This was the time when computers were first starting to become accepted in the home, and the wealth of prewritten software we have now wasn't there, and so people wanted the ability to write their own for little tasks, in a language approachable to both adults and children alike.
Nowadays, most people use computers without any knowledge of operating systems, much less programming. Computers no longer come with a BASIC interpreter, and even if they did, most kids now hold higher expectations for what computers can do and what games should be able to do. I certainly don't mind playing around with some of those old games from the 8-bit days, blocky appearance and all, but kids today haven't lived long enough to develop a nostalgia for those. The original style of BASIC isn't going to cut it, and assembly? I honestly cannot imagine any child picking up a book for assembly language, having done no previous tinkering with programming, and hacking out a game complete with the bells and whistles of sound and graphics.
You don't learn how to swim without first testing the waters and getting a feel for floating and paddling around, and you don't learn programming without first having played around in a safe environment that doesn't intimidate you with error messages picking apart syntax. Maybe you did, but I know I didn't. Scratch, or maybe other visual programming languages that enable use of modern media in a safe environment, could very well be the new generation's BASIC.
Porting current, probably complicated and difficult to rewrite from scratch, applications written in VB.net over to Linux? I'd like to hear how the library support is, though. That seems a bit peculiar to me, but I don't know much about Mono either.