Me too! With Sendkeys and some Win32 API calls, I wrote an AOL add-on (available through Keyword: addons) called AoLOL!. It was my first software business.
Q: How do you identify the AOL window?
A: Look for an app with titlebar = "America[space][space]Online"
Roblox studio. My son is a sound designer for some of the top games there. He's also learning programming in Lua for Roblox platform.
It is a small community of mostly kids aged 15-25 as far as I can tell. It doesn't seem like any professional adult game developers are part of the community (I got an inside view when I took my son to RDC this year).
The top game developers are making millions of dollars per year (they're paid in Robux and converted to USD).
In short, thriving ecosystem with lots of kids having fun doing creative work including creating games, writing code, designing graphics, designing sound effects.
When I heard about how Tesla was training it's AI - without describing objects but instead through direct observation - it reminded me of Heinlein's "Door Into Summer" (1956). Heinlein's character teaches a multipurpose robot how to do any tedious human task through direct observation.
Ha, back in 1995 I could HEAR in advance when my PC was going to crash. I could tell from the certain crunching / grinding sounds of the hard disk. I could hear it and think "Uh oh, here comes a crash..." And then blue screen of death.
I used VB 3.0 thru VB 6.0 and I echo the sentiment: those were fun and productive times. Really solid integrated development environment centered around the desktop UI / form design / UI controls like buttons, textboxes, combo boxes, etc.
I also agree that the web changed everything and that is the major reason for the shift away.
Ha, that scene is how I learned to program. Built a shareware tool called AoLOL! (available by going to keyword "Addon"), $14.95, got paper checks from all over the country! Then I met the ICQ founders...
5 kids in a car, held, seated, seatbelted, any-which-way. Like on a train.