I'm not calling myself great, but my initial introduction to programming was a Logo robot at the age of 6 or 7 in the 80s, so I'm not sure I agree with you. A turtle shaped robot we could get to draw things. All primary schools at that time usually had a BBC Micro in each class too.
Perhaps it was just a British thing. After that it was some BASIC on spectrums, some BASIC on Acorn Archimedes, then some random OO language on Amiga that I've never really been able to track down what it was called.
And I wasn't even that keen on programming, I was just exposed enough and wanted to build better games than my friends at lunch or on our graphical calculators. I remember running out of memory on my graphing calculator trying to get a working version of poker (which I now realize was wildly more ambitious than the versions of blackjack we all made).
A lot of programmers of my age will remember the turtle with fondness.
I guess all of those were incredibly simple to setup to start programming (for the spectrum it would go straight to the command line), but then again these days so's pressing F12 on a web browser to get a working command line.
Definitely not just a British thing - that was part of my introduction to programming in the US in the 80's. It might be a very 80's-specific thing, though.
Perhaps it was just a British thing. After that it was some BASIC on spectrums, some BASIC on Acorn Archimedes, then some random OO language on Amiga that I've never really been able to track down what it was called.
And I wasn't even that keen on programming, I was just exposed enough and wanted to build better games than my friends at lunch or on our graphical calculators. I remember running out of memory on my graphing calculator trying to get a working version of poker (which I now realize was wildly more ambitious than the versions of blackjack we all made).
A lot of programmers of my age will remember the turtle with fondness.
I guess all of those were incredibly simple to setup to start programming (for the spectrum it would go straight to the command line), but then again these days so's pressing F12 on a web browser to get a working command line.