The first time I had the "beginner" reflex was when I got an always on computer with an editor and storage.
Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare.
Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger!
I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper".
Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless.
A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed.
Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.
Before that, I had an TI-99 4A at home without a tape drive and the family tv as a display. I mainly was into creating games for my friends. I did all my programming on paper, as the "screen time" needed to be maximized for actually playing the games after typing it in from the paper notebook. Believe it or not, but bugs were very rare.
Much later at uni there were computer rooms with Mac's with a floppy drive. You could actually just program at the keyboard, and the IDE even had a debugger!
I remember observing my fellow students endlessly type-run-bug-repeat until it "worked" and thinking "these guys never learned to reason through their program before running it. This is just trial and error. Beginners should start on paper".
Fortunately I immediately caught myself and thought, no, this is genuine progress. Those that "abuse" it would more than likely not have programmed 'ye old way' anyways, and some others will genuinely become very good regardless.
A second thing: in the early home computer year(s) you had to program. The computer just booted into the (most often BASIC) prompt, and there was no network or packaged software. So anyone that got a computer programmed.
Pretty soon, with systems like the Vic-20, C64 and ZX Spectrum there was a huge market in off the shelf game cassettes. These systems became hugely popular because they allowed anyone to play games at home without learning to program. So only those that liked programming did. Did that lose beginner programmers? Maybe some, for sure.