In reality, I'd wager there's a _lot lot_ more kids programming today than 30 years ago. How many people had a computing device at home back then?
This anecdote makes the point that a very specific kind of thinking was better suited by the tools of the late 70s, and maybe - I've never been much inclined towards it, so I dunno.
And what we consider 'programming' is blurrier than it used to be. Is HTML programming? What if you use a fancy editor like dreamweaver? Only when it becomes dynamic? Does CSS count? A lot of youngsters, when they aren't getting off my lawn, have done web stuff, and the fact that it's a gradual shift from being a user to being a programmer probably makes it even easier.
I find the whole premise of this blog post flawed. (Great Scott! Someone disagrees with someone else on the Internet!)
If you boot up an Apple II without a disk in the drive (or something incredibly simple like that), it drops into AppleSoft Basic. That's how I learned that one could program a computer. For sample code I could turn to a number of magazines about my computer, or the manual that came with it. No questions or outside research dependent on anyone else (including the Internet) were required. This was when I was of single-digit age. The barrier to entry was tiny (type "10 print hello world" at the command prompt). Nothing like that exists for a curious child at this point unless their parents take the initiative, or the child waits until they're older.
I was a little after this, but it was similar. Dad had QBASIC on his Gateway2000 machine that we played Oregon Trail, WITWICSD, Prince of Persia and so forth on. I had fun with qmaze, qbricks, and so forth - and then I asked dad if there was a way to cheat. He showed me the qbasic ide, and handed me a qbasic manual. And then he said, "Have fun!" - I was in the single digits when this happened, as well. Unfortunately, I never really made much with it - just had fun making custom brick shapes in the tetris clone.
I was lucky, and in middle school, we had an elective that allowed us to use lego robotics and logo to do some really basic stuff (one of the projects, if I recall, was building a robot arm to sort bricks based on color). Not much problem solving involved in it, though - they just gave us "type this in" and "put the legos together this way" instruction booklets. If we had been encouraged to solve the problems for ourselves, I might have gotten a lot more out of it. As it is, I don't recall any logo at all.
Didn't do any more programming until sophomore year of high school, and things like optimized sort algorithms really caught my imagination. Haven't really looked back since...
And I disagree with you here. Writing declarative HTML and writing a simple interactive computer game are two activities that could not be more different.
Like it or not, the act of programming has become much more difficult than it once was. 1988 I could reboot my Apple IIgs, hold down a couple of keys, and I could start writing a BASIC program immediately.
And in 1995, I could write interactive (quasi) graphical games on my TI-81. Without rebooting. At the time, a TI-81 was pretty fancy, but I've seen plenty that leads me to believe that nearly every kid today has a TI-83 for their math class. It's not quite basic, but it's certainly programming, and it's just as easy and accessible as an Apple used to be.
Kids are not fooled. Programming a computer and calculator are also not the same thing. While I enjoyed hacking on my graphing calculator as well, the limitations of the calculator (no color, small screen, no keyboard) made it fairly limited for learning any broader concepts about programming.
TI-83 and the manual where the ways that I started in programming. I would most likely try to spark my own kids interest in programming the same way. The greatest thing about programming on the TI-83 was that I could write programs anywhere. I took that calculator with me everywhere and would even program while we were out at a restaurant or after completing an assignment in class.
I don't see that it is that much harder now. Boot your mac, open a terminal, type python, and start programming. Does it take one more step? Maybe, but it is a joke to say that is somehow more difficult.
Show me a tutorial on Python graphics on OS X that doesn't require installing an external library or learning about a really complicated graphics framework (Quartz 2D) and I'll believe what you just wrote.
Your requirement that there be no external libraries is unfair. It's perfectly valid for a tutorial to start with "Download this package and run the installer," which is easier than any actual programming the reader might do.
There are plenty of great tutorials for PyGame and pyglet. The main issue is that you have to open a terminal.
If you look past Python, Scratch provides a very low barrier to entry for this sort of thing.
Your requirement that there be no external libraries is unfair.
If the question being discussed is "How likely is an 8-year-old to randomly discover programming", it's not unfair in the slightest. Installation of anything is a huge barrier to discoverability.
Random discovery is so difficult. If only there was an engine of some sort that we could search things with. We could call this engine of search - Bing!
Very well. See http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~tneller/resources/k12/index.html for a tutorial that demonstrates the use of the 'turtle' built in module in python. Turtle has a long history of being a simple graphical environment to introduce programming to young individuals, and that hasn't changed over the years. It would meet the original post author's requirements for graphing those simple functions.
Assuming you are targeting those -slightly- older, pyglet would offer an incredibly simple way to progress, but would require you download one library, which I feel is a very reasonable requirement.
Almost every web browser on the planet can run javascript, independent of operating system or underlying hardware. I don't think you can get more accessible than that
This anecdote makes the point that a very specific kind of thinking was better suited by the tools of the late 70s, and maybe - I've never been much inclined towards it, so I dunno.
And what we consider 'programming' is blurrier than it used to be. Is HTML programming? What if you use a fancy editor like dreamweaver? Only when it becomes dynamic? Does CSS count? A lot of youngsters, when they aren't getting off my lawn, have done web stuff, and the fact that it's a gradual shift from being a user to being a programmer probably makes it even easier.
I find the whole premise of this blog post flawed. (Great Scott! Someone disagrees with someone else on the Internet!)