Back in the day, my brothers and I would spend hour’s hand keying a program into our trusty TI-99/4, out of a magazine. Only to run it and find that we typed ‘0ff0ff0ff’ instead of ‘1ff0f0ff’; causing the attacking aliens to look like four-leaf clovers instead of the menacing killer robots they were. So we spend hours re-keying everything trying to find the error. Well after the invention of the tape recorder, and finally the 40K disk drive. We could save and edit, and trade of programs. But still the creation of those programs was most of the fun. And that’s the key; FUN! It’s why I got into computers.
Well, now I have multi-gigahertz, multi-gigabyte, million color, and flat-panel display computers; and what to I use them for? Writing high speed, transactional software; and as boring as that might sound; it really far more boring than even that.
So you can imagine how exciting it was to find Kids Programming Language! KPL First; everything is free. Second; there are tons of sample programs. Third; no one has any idea of how to do things right, so no one is telling you your doing something wrong!
Want to fly a ship across the screen? Five lines of code. Want a horde of attacking aliens to slowly descend onto your defended base? Maybe a 100 lines. This is what I really wanted to make computers do 25 years ago. I’m having far more fun trying to figure out why my KPL programs not scoring right; then why credit dispatch is failing… again.
Hint:
