Hey, I got started programming in VB3! Thank you for your involvement in forming my expectations of programming.
I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first".
To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achieving things that should be simple.
Today's equivalent would be an IDE that you hit "new project" and type a few lines and draw a few boxes and you've got something up and running in the cloud. There's nothing like it as far as I know; there's an entire generation or more who have never seen programming work like that, and don't even envision it, it seems. Bold ambitions these days usually amount to a clone of a popular thing, with some kind of tweak that's interesting but not nearly interesting enough to get people to move.
I feel like my path was so much better because I started from laying out a UI and then learning code as a way to make it do stuff instead of the "lets learn complicated goop with no clear purpose first".
To this day I'm amazed by how ok devs are with not being able to get instant satisfaction from achieving things that should be simple.