Uhhh... have you seen Pico-8 development. People can excel on that thing. The limitations make the achievements even more remarkable. If you want to see the excellence in coding, combine the two and check out the people who wrote BBC BASIC raytracers in a tweet. If anything, we're in a glut of shitty code today partly because our comparatively powerful machines, combined with a race to the bottom in terms of churning product out quickly, make writing and shipping something extremely unoptimized far, far easier than taking time to polish the end product.
I think you're onto something, in that the Pico-8 and Picotron are going for the "vibe" of retro home computer/console programming but are not capturing the true essence of it. With 8-bit home computers, you started off in BASIC and could build simple games and stuff -- but if you wanted to write anything performant then you had to drop down to assembly and there was a significant difficulty spike there. So even back then we were dealing with "unfun" stuff. (In general, the enjoyment you got out of such work was proportional to the effort you put in.)
Yeah, I know. I had an early Acorn machine as a kid and couldn't figure out how my favourite games were made. I was aware they weren't using BASIC, but how they really did it was a mystery. And 3D graphics like Elite left me foxed. I tried to do my own but had never heard of trigonometry so that didn't go far :)
Even so, the span in which you can excel is far more limited. Nothing stops you making 8-bit graphics today (see Notch) but people and especially kids will compare what they can do to, say, Call of Duty and lose interest when they realize how far away they are. Micro games at least tended to be made by one person, so it was theoretically possible to get that level of skill yourself.
Uhhh... have you seen Pico-8 development. People can excel on that thing. The limitations make the achievements even more remarkable. If you want to see the excellence in coding, combine the two and check out the people who wrote BBC BASIC raytracers in a tweet. If anything, we're in a glut of shitty code today partly because our comparatively powerful machines, combined with a race to the bottom in terms of churning product out quickly, make writing and shipping something extremely unoptimized far, far easier than taking time to polish the end product.
I think you're onto something, in that the Pico-8 and Picotron are going for the "vibe" of retro home computer/console programming but are not capturing the true essence of it. With 8-bit home computers, you started off in BASIC and could build simple games and stuff -- but if you wanted to write anything performant then you had to drop down to assembly and there was a significant difficulty spike there. So even back then we were dealing with "unfun" stuff. (In general, the enjoyment you got out of such work was proportional to the effort you put in.)