In the late '90s, I really wanted to learn how to make a computer game. Our family's only computer was some kind of Power Mac. I managed to find my way into a basic copy of code warrior (because it looked like a programming tool based on a computer catalog). But we only had dial up internet that had to be used with permission because it hogged the phone lines. And nothing built in to the manual really explained enough to do much besides some basic stuff involving printing characters to the screen, and some keyboard input. If the manual had any kind of tutorial sufficient to make snake or even just a really bad version of asteroids or galaga or something I'd probably have never put down the keyboard. But instead, I kind of lost interest because I assumed I was missing something you needed to make graphical programs. Another barrier was that what internet time I did have mostly lead to Windows stuff. Not that I really knew how or what to look for.
The first program I was ever able to write that involved things actually moving on a screen came a couple years later and was written on my graphing calculator. Solely because the calculator came with a big manual that documented all kinds of functions you could use in a program. And so long as you were writing only a few pixels at a time its built-in basic language was just barely good enough.
> And nothing built in to the manual really explained enough to do much besides some basic stuff involving printing characters to the screen, and some keyboard input. If the manual had any kind of tutorial sufficient to make snake or even just a really bad version of asteroids or galaga or something I'd probably have never put down the keyboard. But instead, I kind of lost interest because I assumed I was missing something you needed to make graphical programs.
This sounds a lot like myself as a kid in the around 1999/2000 after getting my parents' Performa tower as a hand-me-down.
I'd become aware that it was possible to build one's own programs, but exactly how was extremely murky. I grabbed various development tools mentioned on the internet, but as you note tutorials were nonexistent and IDEs, consoles, etc may as well have been ancient tablets written in an archaic language.
Finally I stumbled across REALBasic, I think maybe on a MacAddict shareware/demo disc, which was analogous to Visual Basic in the Windows world (though unlike VB, RB could compile binaries for both platforms). That was far more intuitive… just drag a button onto your window-canvas and double-click the button to edit its code. Examples were also much more common and easy to find on the internet and so before too long I was hitting the ceiling of what was possible in RB.
That segued nicely into Cocoa development when OS X rolled around, which brought Project Builder and similar (but far more extensive) WYSIWYG UI builder with Interface Builder. That took a lot longer to become capable with, but led me to where I am today as a mobile dev.
Sounds very much like my experience, except that I was using Delphi. Non-existent documentation (complicated by me not speaking English at the time), no friends or relatives using computers for anything other than office documents (and very few having or using them at all), no access to the internet, and a friendly neighborhood software store that sold "pirated" copies of Delphi 7 for something like $2. That was an excellent environment to start precisely for reasons you described: double click on any element created an event handler for its "main event", and you could take it from there.
But: Object Pascal/Delphi is a quite powerful language and you can write really complicated stuff with it, compiled into a relatively small statically linked executable that worked just about everywhere without the need to install anything. (300-400 KB binaries seemed large at the time, little I knew what awaited us 20 years down the line.)
The need to dig and learn everything yourself definitely had some impact and provided some lower level knowledge of things many newer developers don't seem to know or care about, but I very much prefer what we have today where you're not expected to learn to read what looks like ancient Egyptian from scratch to write a basic calculator. Good riddance to those times.
Sounds like the opposite of my experience with Java in 1996. I had some great thick book on it (as was the style at the time), and after chapters on language basics, streams, collections, etc, it quickly got on to GUI programming with AWT. AWT is pretty horrible in many ways, but it did make it very easy for a teenage novice to put up a window with some buttons in it, and start drawing lines and text.
I immediately started working on an ambitious space battle game. I got to the point where you could click to set waypoints for a ship, and it would try to fly a course through them, using Newtonian physics, but the navigation was incredibly naive, and always just accelerated towards the next waypoint, so eventually the ship was going so fast it crossed over the waypoint in a single time step, and would turn round and come back to it, inevitably missing is again, and so basically going into perpetual powered orbit around it. I then abandoned the project.
REAL Basic was actually an amazing program. Easily throw together a cross platform GUI and one click to create a self contained executable. Remarkable that we struggle with this in Modern stacks.
I also got a strong interest in programming 1998/1999-ish and also had only a Mac at home. I emailed the guy who authored a chess application (his email was in the splash screen) over our dial up connection. He told me I would need to learn C or C++ and I had no idea how to act on that (I was 8 or 9 at the time, living in a very rural area).
4 or 5 years later I got my own laptop and installed Linux on it. Then I started learning bash and tried (and failed) to install Linux From Scratch. That did get me to a point where I could program.
This is my story too. I remember playing with Basic on an Apple II and how it was a revelation, but then a big void in the 90s up until graphing calculator in high school. I was so frustrated, programming seemed a parallel world I had no idea how to reach but was deeply attracted to. I had fun with HyperCard and ResEdit but I knew I was just scratching the surface. When I finally grabbed a copy of CodeWarrior it was way too complex for me, and console-like C programs too limited. If only something like Unity had existed back then..
Turbo Pascal, Delphi, QuickBasic (not so much QBasic), and Visual Basic had amazing built-in documentation for learning how to do things in a pre-internet way. That's what got me started.
For me was learning to rom-hack using hexadecimal editors because that was the only information available online in my native language. Mostly from people translating nes/snes/megadrive/gameboy roms.
I only got into actual programming several years later by joining computer course during high school.
The first program I was ever able to write that involved things actually moving on a screen came a couple years later and was written on my graphing calculator. Solely because the calculator came with a big manual that documented all kinds of functions you could use in a program. And so long as you were writing only a few pixels at a time its built-in basic language was just barely good enough.