> I would be surprised if your first program was C++? Specifically, getting a decent C++ toolchain that can produce a meaningful program is not a small thing?
Visual C++ (some version) was in a book I received as a gift in high school, it was my second language after BASIC (some version on a Tandy running MS-DOS). It was not hard to set up. You ran the installer, you had the language set up. If someone had ended up in the same situation as me but without the BASIC experience, I could see it being an easy to set up (not easy to learn) first language.
Apologies for making you prove the statement. That wasn't my intention.
I was musing on how expensive a C++ capable setup was back when I was learning. I was probably closer to having it as an opportunity than I realize. But MS Access and the like was already something that was beyond my realistic budget for things. That was largely helping out with business software friends of the family were using.
I am probably also more sour on just how silly difficult it is to put pixels on a screen nowadays. Python's turtle graphics kind of works ok, if you are only doing turtle graphics. But just getting a sprite and moving it around can be surprisingly involved, it seems. I wanted my kids to learn with the Code the Classics book. May have them give that a try again, soon. First pass, they all have far more mileage with Scratch.
> I am probably also more sour on just how silly difficult it is to put pixels on a screen nowadays.
It seems like it's always been this way. I messed around with VB6 as a kid. It was an amazingly intuitive experience to work with forms, buttons, and hooking up simple actions to them.
However, when it came time to do some simple 2d graphics, like moving balls around the screen, you'd be in the deep end, trying to figure out BitBlt and double-buffering and the like. You might as well have been using C++.
Agreed that getting into the weeds has always been difficult. Especially if you needed it to go fast. Just setting up a double buffered set of screens was easy enough, though?
Visual C++ (some version) was in a book I received as a gift in high school, it was my second language after BASIC (some version on a Tandy running MS-DOS). It was not hard to set up. You ran the installer, you had the language set up. If someone had ended up in the same situation as me but without the BASIC experience, I could see it being an easy to set up (not easy to learn) first language.