A caution to posters: be careful generalizing from "the way it was" to "the way it should be". Just because you grew up on text interfaces (or punched card
) doesn't mean it'll work for everyone, or as well as it did for you; especially given that myriad alternatives exist today.
Put another way, a much lighter-weight version of the "I had to walk to school uphill both ways, so you should too" thought process. An easier experience for the new generation does not invalidate the hardships (or indeed, trauma) you endured at a similar time in your life. Nor does it preclude us from congratulating your perseverance through those hardships.
The best thing about programming these days, is the myriad ways to get into it; try the spaghetti strategy, throw everything and see what sticks. Maybe it's Scratch, maybe it's something else, maybe it's text maybe Python maybe Java maybe something else. Maybe it's something even more specialized yet very powerful, Unity for example. Or, I'm a bit loathe to suggest it as I've actively avoided it myself so far, but it's also my understanding that there are moderately powerful creative tools in games like Roblox, even.
The real danger, honestly, is the paradox of choice: we have so many to choose from today, it's hard to narrow it down to a few. I would suggest trying everything in this thread (maybe even the punched cards, hell -- there are in-browser emulators out there, give it a go, why not!
), and then some. Even just picking a few from here will do well to resolve that paradox.
For my part, I can only speak to what I did, and why; in my case, it was the curiosity over this arcane interface, yet potentially unlimited insight into, and power over, the computer I had (which, I started on a hand-me-down 8086 from a neighbor -- with 128k EGA, so powerful..!). Which meant not just QBASIC but DEBUG as well. (Between me and my older brother, we had drummed up some DOS manuals and other docs that gave enough info to assemble trivial programs, like printing a string in DOS. Not sure when, I don't have a copy of it handy, but somewhere along the line I had written a ~60 byte program, mouse drawing pixels to the screen.) By end of high school, I had written a number of 3D graphics programs in QuickBasic, helped to various degrees with ASM routines (CALL ABSOLUTE), mostly based on other programs and a book or two I'd seen along the way.
My curiosity is probably exceptional, though. It is said, schooling tends to have the effect of stomping curiosity out of children, which is in my mind a cardinal sin. But it's also merely a symptom, one of many in a vast cluster of imposed downward trends in this country and elsewhere; but that's a topic for another (non-)discussion.
Tim