Tonight I sat down with my daughter after playing a few games together. She then asked:
Dad, How do you make Apps?
So we sat down together and I showed her how to write “Hello World” in Go – I instructed while she typed all the code in VS Codium (complete with NeoVim and vi key bindings) and then she built the program with go build and ran it 👌
Then she wanted more! So I say down and quickly built a classic “number guessing” game and progressively added more features and changed the rules until we got to a point where she exclaimed:
This is pretty fun! I’m playing this game on my iPad but this game is more fun!
I asked her whether it was because we made it together:
Yup
😍
@prologic@twtxt.net Achievement unlocked: Let me code, Daddy!
@prologic@twtxt.net Sounds like you have a little coder on your hands. I tried starting my boys like that, but they prefer that others write the code.
@prologic@twtxt.net reading this story was wholesome. I think your daughter is lucky to have you 😊
I remember being a curious 6 years old kid in the 90s, learning QBasic with the tutorial included with Ms-Dos 6.22 (didn’t know English yet, so there were limited docs and books) precisely with that classic number guessing game. Later in elementary school they teached us GW-Basic and Logo.
Sadly I had no relatives interested in computing at that time. But they were supportive on that strange hobby. So I always remember that moment with pleasure.