You know, for the kids

Slashdot linked to a cool interview with Linux/Mac OS X programmer Rich Wareham today, and it contains this nice little bit of nostalgia:

Also, although there is a lot of material, modern computers are too sophisticated when it comes to getting you hooked. With the old home computers one could get instant gratification by writing a program which drew a space-ship on the screen in 10 lines of BASIC. Nowadays you'd have to learn COM + Win32 + DirectX just to get a black rectangle. The 'activation energy' required for kids to get exciting things on the screen has increased exponentially over the past decade.

Hell yes. I remember designing the coolest stuff in HyperCard while I was still in elementary school. It was so fun and easy to create 'cards', and write little HyperTalk scripts that moved between them and manipulated the contents. (Fun and easy enough for Robyn and Rand Miller to create Myst, apparently.) Now recreational programming is much more of a hassle.