Louie Mantia makes some excellent points:

Just the other day I was wondering… what happens now? Not with me, but with the next fourteen-year-olds who are ready to be inspired. Do they look at Dribbble and decide to make things? Do they jump in and make an app?

I started by tinkering, customizing. Just as an engineer might. You start with something that exists and you change it to understand it. You do things on your own. But now… companies like Apple have locked down things like theming. It’s so hard today that no one even bothers. Changing icons is hard too. With some apps you can’t even do it without an app breaking because of code signing.

Most of the people I know listed above have a similar story. Maybe young people will be inspired by our apps, maybe they’ll be inspired by our art. But will they be able to tinker like we could?  

  

I can’t claim results anything like Louie Mantia’s, but I also got into computers through tinkering. I took a course in elementary school writing BASIC on Olivetti 286es, and our programs were superficially indistinguishable from system built-ins. When I graduated to Macs, I soon discovered ResEdit and started playing around with that. When I got an after-school job that required me (among other things) to do data-entry on a FileMaker Pro database, I improved the UX in several places, fixing things like the tab-order, then adding validation logic and primitive auto-completion.  

My initial reaction was “how do kids today get into tinkering?”. Then I realised I was looking at the wrong level of the stack. Kids get into tinkering with Minecraft or by messing around with web pages. So what if I didn’t hand-wind my own resistors or learn to count in hex until much later? The point is the learning and the playing. Some - even most - will stay at the top levels of abstractions, but many will be prompted to dig deeper.  

I look forward to seeing what treasure they bring back.