I just got a really interesting message last night from my old college roommate Dan. He's got a couple of kids now, and his son Alexander is learning Java, because he plans to take a programming course this summer to learn programming for Minecraft. Obviously, I can understand his motives. Aside from my own experience with the game, my godson Sean, who's the same age as Alexander, is a Minecraft fiend, and may be looking into similar esoteric matters.

So Dan set him up with NetBeans on his Mac, which is a good choice, though I prefer Eclipse myself. And the kid is just going to town with it, apparently. The thing that concerns Dan is, he refuses any kind of formal instruction in the language or object-oriented development in general, or even reading one of the many books about programming Java. He just watches various YouTube videos, and Googles for snippets of code that he copies and pastes, trying to come up with something that does what he wants. To Dan, who has more formal computer-science education than I do (he went up to UC Davis for grad school after we graduated from UCSB), this is somewhat dismaying. It even seems a little haphazard to me.

Yet, if you look back on it, is this really that much different from the way people like Dan and me first learned programming? Of course, we were working with much less-powerful machines and tools; I had a TI-99/4A back in those days, and I was lucky enough to have the (expensive!) Peripheral Expansion Box with the disk drive (all of 90K of storage on a single-sided 5-1/4" floppy disk!) and the 32K memory expansion card, for a grand total of 48K of RAM. And the most powerful language I was using was the Extended BASIC cartridge. As for outside information resources, all I had was the occasional book and a subscription to an early computer magazine. I didn't even have a modem to dial into BBSs; I think my parents were afraid I'd turn into a system cracker ala David Lightman in WarGames. And, needless to say, I'd never even heard of the Internet in those days. So I persevered, spending long hours at the keyboard, scrawling out lines of BASIC in endless pages in notebooks, tracing out sprite designs on graph paper left over from my Dungeons & Dragons gaming and converting those patterns to hex numbers to put in source code, patiently organizing sound-chip calls (such-and-such a frequency, at such-and-such a duration, for each individual note, to play tunes), and impressing my friends with the results whenever they came over to see. I had no notion of even structured programming, let alone more modern and esoteric techniques; I just did what worked. And it managed to hold my interest long enough to get me to the University, where I started really tearing into code development. (Even there, I was still learning. I think of all the computer time I blew through on an old PDP-11/70 they had there, creating code for an adventure-type game, because I hadn't yet learned how to properly design a lexical analyzer.)

In the modern age, of course, it's much easier to get started. Since he has a Mac, Alexander already has a Unix system much more powerful than anything Dan and I were using in college. All the tools he needs to start programming are freely available. Thanks to the open-source movement, there is a plethora of code out there he can use, learn from, and improve on, all of it easily findable via Google. And there are tutorials, both printed and audio-visual, right at his fingertips. Yet, at the same time, there's much less motivation to actually learn programming. Computers these days do many useful things right out of the box, as opposed to my TI, which popped up a title screen, then a menu, then just the prompt "TI BASIC READY" and a blinking cursor. Most kids these days don't seem to get beyond game-playing, Microsoft Office, and the browser, and, even in the schools, "computer classes" have been limited to just learning how to use computers, rather than program them. (That was, in fact, the inspiration for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which designed its $35 Linux machine for kids to learn programming on. Of course, a "real" computer that cheap lends itself to all sorts of other uses.) So Alexander is already noteworthy among kids for getting as far as he has. Still, if he decides to actually go into the field, I suspect he'll have a lot of bad habits he'll have to unlearn. That's not necessarily a problem; for many years, Linus Torvalds was able to develop, and coordinate the development of, his famous kernel without even proper version control. (And he wound up writing that himself, too.) Talent can substitute for proper technique, at least, up to a point.

For Dan, this is a great opportunity for father-son bonding, much as dads in earlier years would help their sons with model airplanes, or play catch with them out in the yard. At least once, Dan speaks of being involved in an intense debugging session with his son, only to have his wife and daughter get home and be dismayed because they hadn't started dinner yet. (Hey, ask Sabrina how hard it is to drag me away from the console when I've been coding!) And he was able to impress his son with a simple recursive function that calculated the Fibonacci series, something we all learned pretty early on in our programming education. I suspect, though, that soon enough, it'll be Alexander that's impressing Dan, as he starts moving into areas Dan hasn't dealt with. Something tells me, though, that he'll turn out all right.

And as I hung up the phone it occurred to me,
He'd grown up just like me,
My boy was just like me
Harry Chapin, "Cat's In The Cradle," 1974

It's time once again for the only universal holiday of the Internet, April Fool's Day.  Here are some of the pranks for today, for your enjoyment:

• Why should grownups have all the fun of project tracking? Atlassian introduces JIRA Jr. to track all the important stuff about being a kid.


• Google once again breaks new ground, with Google Nose. Why scratch-and-sniff, when you can click-and-sniff? (Don't get too used to it though...after the whole Google Reader thing, you never know what they'll shut down next...)


• And another improvement from Google, this one to its Gmail service (which, lest we forget, was launched on an April Fool's Day): Gmail Blue. Like the Gmail you know and love, only bluer!


• YouTube reveals its big secret: it's actually been an 8-year-long contest all along to find the best video on the Internet. Now they're shutting down to start judging all those videos. Expect to find out who the winner is...in about 10 years...


• Not to be outdone, Google Maps now offers a treasure mode.


• The hits just keep on coming from the Googleplex: Google+ allows you to attach real emotions to your pictures. (Insert joke about Google+ being the real April Fool's joke here...)


• Twitter is becoming a two-tiered service. The free version, "Twttr," will only let you use consonants. If you want vowels, upgrade for only $5 a month. Hey, Vanna, pick me a letter!


• Virgin Atlantic announces a new innovation: the world's first glass-bottomed plane.


• Check out some of ThinkGeek's latest products, such as the Batman Family Car Decals, Adventure Time BMO Interactive Buddy, Aliens Chestburster-in-a-Can, Eye of Sauron Desk Lamp, Play-Doh 3D Printer, and MinecraftCreeper Body Pillow.


• President Obama announces a plan to try to pay down the national debt through crowdfunding. I guess it's no stupider an idea than anything else that's come out of the White House recently...


• What Obama has actually done (and this is not actually a joke, but it might as well be) is to proclaim April "National Financial Capability Month," in which he wants to "teach young people how to budget responsibly." I'm withMichelle Malkin on this: would you take financial advice from an Administration that has racked up more debt than all previous Administrations in American history, and whose own budget is two months late?


• Nokia announces a microwave oven...which, given the way they've been sucking out in the mobile phone market recently, might actually be a viable business plan for them.


• Slashdot announces that, to encourage users to log in, they will be encrypting all stories with ROT13. Click one button to decrypt the story...but anonymous users will just need to watch an interstitial ad first.


• Also on Slashdot, a true battle of the Computing Titans. Who will win...the Radio Shack TRS-80 or the Commodore 64?


• No more secret sauce! Introducing the Open Sauce Foundation, sponsored by McIlhenny (the Tabasco sauce people), Huy Fong Foods (who make Sriracha Rooster Sauce), and Kikkoman.


• Linus Torvalds is jumping ship from the Linux Foundation to head up Microsoft's Windows 9 project. After the debacle of Windows 8, this could only make things better.


• Fermilab chooses a new director...who thinks bow ties (and fezzes) are cool.


• Meanwhile, over at CERN, they're running a lottery. Ten lucky winners will each get their very own Higgs Boson! (How much will those go for on eBay?)


• Coming soon to Broadway: Shadow War of the Night Dragons - The Musical! Based on the work of John Scalzi, who addresses the rumors here.


• Meanwhile, Charles Stross is becoming a producer; read about his first project.


• Apple finally introduces their much-rumored iWatch...but it's not what you might think. (But it'll still be a better product than their Maps app on iOS!)


• Your new RFCs for today: RFC 6919, "Further Key Words for Use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels," and RFC 6921, "Design Considerations for Faster-Than-Light (FTL) Communication." The former is slightly silly, but the latter actually has some decent science-fictional content to it.


• Introducing "Take Your Computer To Work Day." Can I bring my Raspberry Pi?


• And speaking of which...Erbosoft Enterprises announces its intentions to take on Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and in fact most of the computer industry. watch this space...