I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?

Teenagers these days grow up with a phone instead of MSDOS or a C64 and how will they ever learn to tinker? How can we transition from play to programming, allowing people to create their own games, like in the old days you could play on a MUD or MUSH (I liked MUSHes better!) and from text adventure to community to programming it had everything. And I want the same thing for the web and messaging. People writing bots. People writing CGI scripts or whatever. I want it all! I want it now!

@kensanata I think (hope?) that the worst days are behind us when it comes to kids not having a good path from play to programing. We went through a period where everything was locked down, windows or console gaming, no real customization in sight. But now, with easy robotics, Raspberry Pis, and competitive programing, it really feels like things have turned a corner. Even MineCraft feels like a step in the right direction, though not as far as a Pi robot

@codesections @kensanata The problem is that those are not "real". They are toys designed for teaching, and you won't be able to make anything that looks and works like a modern website or game with them.

@deshipu @kensanata I don't know. I mean, you couldn't build anything that looks like a modern website on an early PC/microcomputer either, but people learned fine. And the Pi at least is pretty capable; I have one that's running a few Git repos, a NextCloud server, a PiHole ad blocker, and a print server without really breaking a sweat.

(I'm not suggesting that those are good projects for kids necessarily, just saying that they have surprising power)

@codesections @kensanata Back then you could easily make things that looked the same, if not better, as any "official" or "professional" thing you could see. Mostly because that's also how those were made.
Today the "real" things are build from layers upon layers of automation and libraries, often, in the case of web, not publicly available (though open source helps here somewhat). The people who build them don't understand them themselves. How can they teach anything?

@codesections @kensanata Writing a commercial game for Atari or Commondore took a single developer a week or two. A dedicated teenager with time on their hands could (and sometimes did) run loops around those. Today a "normal" computer game takes a year for hundreds of people, with a budget of a Hollywood movie. It's like teaching to play a tinwhistle someone who habitually listens to symphonies. They will never get even close.

@deshipu @codesections hm. How much programming is there is mods for Skyrim and the like? Perhaps that’s an intermediate step?

@kensanata @codesections I was paid for the first website that I made. Nobody is going to pay you for a skyrim mod.