The iPhone killed my inner nerd

I started with a TI-99/4a back in 1983 at six years old; I've forgotten most of what I learned as a child tinkering with BASIC and later with DOS/Windows machines. I learned early on that programming wasn't for me, but I love hardware hacking and use those skills daily.

> I know the raspberry pie and stuff are a way to do that, but it feels so artificial and fake.

The Raspberry Pi came about as the result of obscure, unsupported, difficult to grok dev boards that polluted the landscape. With the release of the Pi, suddenly we had a dev board that had a maintained and supported Linux distro, GPIO that was thoroughly and correctly documented, and a community that actually cared about the device. Fast forward five years and it has stayed the dominant "consumer developer" device because it has opened up more and more, while still being 100% supported by its makers rather than closed and abandoned after every minor revision (looking at you, Hardkernel).

If anything, the RPi has revitalized programming as an educational path for young children, and I applaud them for that.

Get a Jeep Wrangler. Though the engine is highly computer controlled and "hands off", you can have a lot of fun bolting everything you can imagine onto the Jeep itself.

I added a pop-top roof, solar panels, dual batteries, a water tank,pump and filtration system, interior cabinets, a fridge, new suspension, bumpers, a winch and a whole lot more to mine!

All the details here: http://theroadchoseme.com/the-jeep

I designed and built the whole thing, which was channeling my inner engineer!

And it is funny because that's the case of basically everything, yet at the same time, being a maker is fashionable and for a reasonable amount of money, people can and do get themselves 70's industrial level workshop in a lot of what was trade only fields.

There's precious little contemplation in this piece. It's like things are just happening to the author, like waves crashing over his head. Really what he's saying is that his "inner nerd" (I'll never get used to (give in to) the enthusiastic adoption of nerd and geek etc) never really had much interest in technology beneath the level of practical communications for home/hobby use. His interest in those things never made him go lower down. But there's always going to be a layer you can go to where tinkering and fiddling are still required.

So his point is taken: for people whose main interest in technology was effectively for personal organisation and home entertainment there is no longer much need, or use, for technical knowledge. Perhaps that will close one pathway into technology. Others will open up.

I would like to think that the industry learned the error of its ways.

The 1980s and 1990s were prime times for kids getting into programming. Early personal computers came with BASIC. Early HTML and JavaScript were simple enough for a child to get into. That seemed to fall apart in the 2000s when programming languages did not come standard with personal computers and the growing complexity of web development made it increasingly difficult to create anything exciting by the standards of the day. Those were also the times when programming books geared towards kids seemed to disappear.

Of course many of the modern efforts are much more artificial since they rely upon programming languages geared towards kids. Yet that is the price of complexity. Regardless of what the article's author argues, modern devices are much more complex under the hood. Much of that complexity bleeds into the tools that would appeal to the inner nerd. Languages geared towards kids both reduce that complexity and add to the excitement of creating more sophisticated programs. Children who learn them will have the basics to leap into "real" programming languages.

The other thing that we have witnessed over the past few years is a renewed interest in books geared towards children of most ages. For a while the best that I saw were titles geared towards teens and determined tweens. Now it is possible to find Python (and Ruby) books that mirror some of the BASIC books that were written for children in the early 1980s.

Things are getting better, even if walled gardens are leading some people to claim otherwise.