alt Hacker NewsFor the past year or so, a couple teen boys from my neighborhood come by on sunday afternoon for a couple hours of programming in python. I started very simply and built up with text based tasks, then showed them pygame.
I am thinking about showing them what is under the hood, that python itself is just a program. When I learned to program it was the late 70s, and trs-80s and apple-IIs were easy to understand at the machine code level.
I could recapitulate that experience for them, via an emulator, but that again just feels like an abstraction. I want them to have the bare-metal experience. But x86 is such a sprawling, complicated instruction set that it is very intimidating. Of course I'd stick to a simplified subset of the instructions, but even then, it seems like a lot more work to make output running on a PC vs on the old 8-bit machines where you write to a specific location and it shows up on the screen.
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You could try the thing that made it click for me, long after x86 was dominant.
Show them a CPU running on Logisim (or the like, such as the newer Digital) and show how when you plug a program into a ROM, it turns into wires lighting up and flipping gates/activating data lines/read registers etc.
Buy them a copy of "Human Resource Machine" on Steam or (preferably since there's no DRM) Good Old Games. It's a gamified version of what writing machine language on the old 8 bit CPUs of yore was like. The puzzle challenge in HRM is authentic in the sense that it derives from the natural constraints of having a single accumulator and very simple instructions rather than unnaturally injected constraints like the Zachtronics games, which are good but I wouldn't recommend as a learning tool.