I still believe it is easier to teach good habits to folks who have experience with bad habits, than to teach folks who have no experience at all. It's not too hard to find examples of how those issues (e.g., globals, stringly types, god-functions) can backfire once you get to scale, but it's really hard to motivate them when folks are still trying to wrap their head around function calls and variable assignment.

You can impart the concept on those without experience, but what you get is cargo culting. Often better than nothing when used for good, but causes sub-optimal (at best) solutions in some cases where people refuse to acknowledge or don't even see better ways to do something because it goes against what they were taught.

That's not to say I'm free of this. I doubt any of us are truly free of this. That said, recognizing it's a thing means you can try to put something into your design practice/workflow where you sit back and think if there's a better way that's a "hack", and try to honestly examine the pros and cons and whether it's actually the better solution.

This is quite true. We are building a VBA interpreter and the language is full of problematic practices. Go's much-maligned if err != nil pales in comparison to On Error Resume Next. Good static analysis and linting really helps here.

> We are building a VBA interpreter and the language is full of problematic practices

Fascinating. I'd love to know what motivated you to undertake that task. Is this open source or a proprietary project?

It will be released as open source over the summer. Currently only the interpreter is working. We are still building out the UI builder and editor. Take a look at our earlier comment regarding motivation/business model:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26325064

What's your stance on accessibility? I'm worried this tool could be used by enterprises, considering their reliance on VB, so this is pretty important IMO.

Cool idea, looking forward to playing with it.

Or they don't understand why its a good habit and so follow the advice blindly, not knowing when to skip it or not. Breadth of experience.

Yeah, it would be fun to imagine a language designed with a video game style unlock progression. I remember programming in TI basic with a small number of global variables and subroutines. No scopes, no local variables, functions _couldn't return variables_, you had to manually keep track of which variables a subroutine was allowed to use, and where it would write out its outputs. After a few months with this functions, scopes, and return values seemed like super powers!

A somewhat similar idea is the Hedy programming language: https://www.hedycode.com/

Wow I didn't realize it was released in 2006 and there's already programmers entering/already in the workforce that started there. I though it was much more recent.

I learnt to code through Roblox and now work as an engineer in a FAANG company. Of the particularly niche audience of teenagers I met on that platform many also owe their careers in tech thanks to the accessibility and gamification of coding.

My thought was "damn, I thought 2006 was recent". But I'm very happy to have seen the field grow so much. I hope my kids employ some of it in whatever field they eventually choose.

Exponential growth is very counter-intuitive. Although it's been around forever the vast majority of users probably came onboard recently.

Never heard of it until today!

> Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).

I feel like that's probably true of everybody's first adventures in programming. Certainly was for all of us who grew up writing BASIC.

Yep, my first experience with programming was TI-BASIC and all I had to go on was the TI-83 manual. I used a lot of GOTO until I figured out how loops worked.

I wouldn't discount Minecraft either! Roblox is probably better for younger children, but I remember being 10 or so and setting up a Minecraft server so my friends and I could play.

Also, if the kid is ambitious, then Minecraft is a stepping stone to Java programming (which may or may not be a good thing overall).

Learning the concepts behind programming is far more important than any particular language.

And, IMHO, Java is highly overrated anyway.

I know several young people who started coding by modifying and creating Minecraft mods. The barrier to entry is definitely higher, though.

I've worked professionally with a person who found their love for programming by modifying Minecraft mods. I'd say he was far better than the vast majority of bootcamp devs, even without much real work experience.

Finding out what is fun for you is such an important step in self-actualisation and a continued interest.

Roblox is like the AOL of a generation - I was 13 when I first got into programming thanks to AOL and it wasn't because AOL had created a programmable platform and API. AOL incentivized busting into chat rooms, punting other users, exploring hidden areas, and generally doing all sorts of stuff that could only be done programmatically by manipulating the client with whatever IPC APIs your OS made available. This is basically how Mark Zuckerberg got going too, so very possibly the world's next Zuckerberg is hacking on Roblox today.

I remember punting. At one point AOL suspended my account for a month for running a punter. I also remember searching various chat rooms and sites trying to find crackz and warez for expensive software like Adobe Flash, so I could make animated videos. Good times!

Faders and other proggies! Hmm, one of the fun ones was something like this: {s /con/con to attempt playing a sound which turned out to be a device?

There won't be a "world's next Zuckerberg", the virgin soil has been claimed and the moats they built to ensure their ownership can only be taken down by concerted government action.

Really? Gen Z barely even participates in Facebook & IG. I don't think the moat is as impenetrable as they would have you believe. At any rate, the next Zucks are being made on blockchain today, not Roblox.

> Gen Z barely even participates in Facebook & IG.

Whatever 'Gen Z' participates in will just be bought by Facebook. Witness WhatsApp.

And blockchain is a financial scam, comparing it with Facebook (which is a real thing even if exploitative) is silly.

There's real value being created on blockchain, sorry if you don't see it but you will be left in the stone age if you don't pick it up:

https://defipulse.com/ https://rarible.com/ https://uniswap.org/ https://status.im/ https://godsunchained.com/ https://aave.com/ https://gitcoin.co/

It's funny that I got into Lua via a Minecraft mod: http://www.computercraft.info/

That's exactly what happened with me as well: I originally started with Lua (knowing only pascal so far) for computer craft and then branched out from there. Now it's my favourite language for everything.

Same! I really liked the mining turtles.

If you have no other automation, turtles are fantastic.

Hands down the best early game automation in kitchen sink packs. Just get a mining turtle, fuel it up and collect resources while you build your base.

And if you have an add-on mod or the cc:tweaked fork that adds better inventory methods, it's possible to build an autocrafter in a sort of DOS style refined storage way :)

If they're "bad practice" but generally lead to favorable results (or almost every result is the result of bad practice), then it might be reasonable to not call it bad practice anymore. While I really love reading concise and beautiful code, I love seeing something work far more.

Is there any particular version of the game you need to be able to code for it? I know for instance - in a vague way - that Minecraft is different in terms of the version that runs on my son's iPad and the Windows version, written in Java.

There are now (historically it was more complicated) two types of Minecraft. The Java type runs on a wide variety of general purpose systems including your Windows PC. On every other platform where Minecraft is still updated it's "Bedrock Edition" which is not Java.

If you buy Minecraft from Microsoft on their Windows store thing I believe you can buy "both" together in some sense, which is a good deal, but obviously programs from the Windows store do not run on an iPad.

Although Microsoft has dipped their toes in the water and sometimes did some PR about it, you can't today mod Bedrock Edition and if you could it would always be a far more limited experience because of how Bedrock Edition works.

For Java Microsoft is doing the most essential work to make modifying it possible, as well as maintaining it, but a huge community actually takes that and runs with it. If you tried to just use what Microsoft makes available then anyone except a Java expert would probably be stuck with toy changes that barely scratch the surface of the game.

For example as a modded player it's hard for me to think about, but there's no electrical power analogue in Minecraft. The modders (not Microsoft, after all their game doesn't have electricity!) added a framework for a single unifying type of electrical power so one mod's steam turbines can power a different mod's plate pressing machine without either of them needing to spend a year designing an electrical energy system they don't really care about.

It's always fascinating what happens when a well organized community starts to develop around easily-modded games. Kerbal Space Program for instance, has people building frameworks, APIs, and resources to make the job of making mods easier.

Part of why it works in KSP's case is that any mod or plugin published to the official forums needs to be distributed with a license.

Thanks! What's the story with Roblox?

> Though it also taught me some ... less favorable habits, as they are more common place. Think of: Continuously calling wait() until something loaded, Excessive use of globals, overuse of strings, coding single god-functions that do everything (with a frick ton of redundancy).

For the target audience of roblox, I'd say that all seems absolutely fine. Anybody who wants to continue programming will sooner or later find out about things like local variables, refactoring code into functions, etc.

It probably easier to learn the good habits once the bad ones have bitten you in the ass. It's hard to learn good habits if you don't understand why the bad ones are bad.

That depends whether one can identify the how and why you've had your ass bitten.

Awesome, curious to know how old you are now and what were your most memorable experiences in Roblox?

I can't speak for OP, but I have a very similar experience:

I was introduced to ROBLOX in late 2008 -- my account was created September 26. I spent the first several months just exploring the platform. It was only a few years old at that point, and had just started the curve upwards on its hockystick graph.

The games were way simpler at the time, and they were genuinely made mostly by kids and young adults, and it showed.

One cool thing I discovered is that not only could you choose to open-source a world, you could publish individual models for anyone to make use of. I saw my first lines of code by grabbing a public model and looking through it to see how it worked.

My first forays into coding was pure "script kiddy": I'd take an existing script, stick it in a new model, and tweak it until I was happy with it. This was often things like taking a model of a sliding door, re-sizing it, and adjusting the script's `for` loop so it would slide the door the full amount I wanted.

I slowly figured out stuff like loops, variables, scope, and flow from that, without ever learning the term or reading a book. I was so engrossed that I asked for and received the Lua Reference Manual for my birthday.

I grew out of the platform's intended audience age early in High School, but I had already transitioned to writing python and making Java mods for Minecraft at that point.

I'm now almost 3 years out of college and doing embedded software engineering full-time. And it does really retain a part of that initial joy; I get the same rush when I write an ISO 8601 parser and see it spit out JSON to AWS, really!

Occasionally I'll log on and check things out. Games are a lot more polished, thanks mainly to the developer program that enables revenue sharing, so people can actually have an income from their creations. The studio and platform have also matured a lot as well. I remember when custom GUIs and dynamic lighting were mind-blowing features we sort of hacked together using tricks like a bunch of semi-transparent spheres anchored at a user's origin to simulate fog.

this was how I felt about actionscript in flash... rip flash