One more question - an untapped audience.

[John Colvin]

On Tuesday, 18 February 2014 at 06:39:51 UTC, Marco Leise wrote:
> Am Mon, 10 Feb 2014 18:11:37 +0000
> schrieb "Steve Teale" <steve.teale at britseyeview.com>:
>
>> What can be done to capture the attention of young people in 
>> the developing world?
>> 
>> Probably the most effective thing would be if it were possible 
>> to edit, compile, and run D programs on a cheap Android ARM 
>> phone.
>> 
>> Is this within the bounds of possibility?
>> 
>> There are millions of unemployed, bored, restless, and 
>> ambitious young men out there, who have saved their all to buy 
>> a cheap smartphone.
>> 
>> Any other ideas?
>> 
>> Steve
>
> How did you get started?
>
> My first language had these properties:
>
> - it was pre-installed on my PC
> - it was powering a game I played
> - it was dead simple with good error detection
> - I/O, audio, graphics was part of the language
>
> It was QBasic on MS-DOS. Later with Windows 3.1 I switched to
> Delphi. The feature set and my usage patterns grew:
>
> - the basic DOS graphics got replaced with window backdrops
>   and "bitmap buttons", sound was provided with
>   SndPlaySound("some.wav").
> - The internet became a new I/O source and I queried a forum
>   for new posts, a server for new Counter-Strike maps etc.
>
> During this transition me and a friend from school tried stuff
> for fun, like exchanging disks with encoded messages that
> could be opened with our "secret network" software, for which
> we split up the work. The motivation was still much about
> making it look and sound cool and surpassing each other with
> fancy ideas and proving that they could be implemented.
>
> I only came to D after I switched to Linux and dropped Delphi.
> By that time I wrote server code in Delphi and Java
> professionally and fancy graphics was no longer a priority.
>
> I don't think D fills the QBasic niche quite so well and to be
> in the Delphi spot requires a much more ready to use
> environment with everything included. And by that I mean
> VisualBasic/C#/Delphi like IDE with accessible help, GUI
> builder, graphics and sound. (Which is much easier if your
> only target is Win32 :p)

Is there any good data on how programmers started out?

My experience was very different: I bought K&R, read it cover to 
cover while trying out the examples, then tried to write a math 
library, only tools involved: gedit and gcc.