I am lucky. I wrote my first program in the 1980s. It only required me to turn on the computer, which took less than a second, write 2 lines of code, type RUN, and voila! The screen was suddenly filled with my name. I was immediately awestruck by the possibilities. If I could do this with 2 lines, imagine what I could do with 6 lines, or even 20 lines! My nine-year-old brain was flooded with so much dopamine that I was addicted to programming at that instant.
Today, software development is immensely more complex. It’s nowhere close to the simplicity of the 1980s, when user interactions only consisted of “press any key to continue,” although users occasionally struggled to find an “any” key on their keyboard. There were no windows, no mice, no web pages, no UI elements, no libraries, no frameworks, no runtimes, no mobile devices. All you had was a set of commands and a static hardware configuration.