OK, so I'm seven years old, I take your code and write it in my Jupyter notebook. Press run and I get half a page of errors with something about TclError: no display name and no $DISPLAY environment variable.
I also have questions:
What is import ? Why do you need to write turtle 3 times ? Why do I have to write t.circle ?
This is boring, I better play Candy Crush on my phone.
Compare your code with the QBasic equivalent:
screen 13
circle (50, 50), 100
Another nice thing about QBasic is that the code is checked after each line and in case of error it shows you a clear error message.
Hey, i remember that! I was actually 7 years old when i first encountered the `CIRCLE (xcenter, ycenter), radius` statement (in GWBasic, but it is the same in QBasic) and... it actually made sense to have the coordinates separate. Although probably a large reason it "made sense" was that i wasn't familiar with any other notation. I quickly jumped to Turbo Pascal and i remember the `Circle` procedure in Turbo Pascal (BGI) looking weird with it being `Circle(xcenter, ycenter, radius);` :-P.
I do not really remember much from that time (it has been almost three decades since then :-P), but this is something i sometimes think back to because of how each statement had a "customized" syntax that i found making sense (e.g. GW/QBasic has `LINE (x1,y1)-(x2,y2)` and this also made sense because i'm drawing a line between two points and again Turbo Pascal's `Line(x1, y1, x2, y2);` felt weird initially) and this sort of statement-specific syntax being something you do not really see in languages nowadays (or even at the time, AFAIK most other BASICs used `LINE x1,y1,x2,y2` - when they offered graphics functionality at all).
OK so I'm 7 years old. My parents are my parents, so I've got constraints you would give a child who sometimes wets the bed and can't always put all their own clothes on.
I've got a bunch of paper and crayons.
See you in a couple of hours, cause I'm just gonna draw.
I was 7 years old in 1980. I only wasn't using a computer yet because I had another year before I got into fourth grade where thet had a class computer (a Commodore PET), and I was programming a computer at home (a Timex/Sinclair 1000) a year after that, and a PC another couple years later. And none of that was particularly outstanding for my peer group, except some of their families got Apple or Atari computers instead of PCs.
Many seven year old children I know cannot even read at that age, let alone write computer programs. Most of them have the deck stacked against them in ways that most HN members or their offspring never will, but it's important not to lose sight of the struggles that average and below-average people face.
Urrm, seven is quite old in respect to doing something like programming. I was writing (quite rubbish) BASIC on the ZX Spectrum at that age in the late 80's. No easy error messages and a single book to help. My own four year old no longer wets the bed and can easily dress herself when she can be convinced too.
I was 7, 30 years ago. We wouldn't have a computer in the house for another 10 years.
Owning a personal computer in the 80's wasn't given, even in the middle class white Connecticut suburban neighborhood I grew up in.
I was introduced to Logo at school maybe not at seven, but maybe 11?
Looking back, I would have given anything to just have more play time where I made up the rules, and those rules weren't called "rules" (because that's what playing is, right?)
As an adult, I find that I'm not playing by making computer programs, but by going into the woods, and pretending I'm basically a kid and exploring and getting a bit caught up in my own imagination. It's... it's lovely.
That to me is the ongoing problem with picking up a programming language these days, figuring out all the available libraries and which of them i need to load to get closer to my goal.
