Thanks - that sounds like a much more interesting and promising approach.

I hate to think of myself as "older" :) But I did grow up where the computer was something my dad would bring home once a month, until the blissful day I managed to save up for my own ZX-80 ... and even then, there were only a handful of crappy games, and nothing like the internet.

What did I do? I watched TV, naturally; I read a lot of books; I rode my bike around to friends' places and played war games or D&D or just mucked around.

Big things that are different now? It's much harder to get bored. As a teen, there were long vast hours where there was nothing good on TV, you'd read all the good books, your friends were unavailable - basically sometimes there was _nothing_ worth doing. I'm sure people now feel the same way some of the time, but if you are from a first world country, you have access to vast amounts of things to read and do, huge libraries of books, Netflix, Youtube, and all the other entertainment hubs, and millions of mindless trivial entertainments.

(Though that can lead to a special modern kind of bored, where you fill time doing something that takes no thought, like browsing reddit or instagram or phone games; but it's still better than having _nothing_ to do, take it from me)

Another huge thing that's different is the amazing level of connectivity. It used to be, if you wanted to organise to see a friend, you had to phone them, on a land-line, if they were home. And if they went overseas, you had to write letters, or make very brief hugely expensive phone calls. Now, I've moved from Melbourne to the UK, and yet I can still skype people at home for free; I can maintain close friends, keep up with my family, and I'm more connected to some old friends than I was 15 years ago, when we lived in the same city.

So, the TL;DR - would I unplug? Maybe for a few days; sometimes It's good to shut down the noise. But never for any length of time - I rely on the computer and the smartphone, to keep me in contact with friends and family, and as a constant source of information. And the occasional crappy phone game.

Me, I'd put good money on "not accurate at all". At least, not as folks generally understand "self aware".

There have been beat-ups about "self-aware" strong AI algorithms since the Eliza program in the 1960s. As a teen growing up I read Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer power and human reason" - the wikipedia article doesn't do it justice, a lot of his argument was that weak AI, i.e. building intelligence along classical programming lines, with codified rules and algorithms, is reasonably straightforward; but writing an algorithm to simulate understanding a set of logic rules is quite different from strong AI, where you are trying to build something that is more like human consciousness.

From some digging it seems the core algorithm here is Deontic Cognitive Event Calculus which looks very cool as a way of codifying and modelling logic and self-awareness and the like. But there's a huge gap, in my mind at least, between being able to model and simulate self-awareness, and actually being self-aware as most people would understand it.

Twine is neat - it was also used to write To be or not to be an awesome "choose-your-own-adventure" adaption of Hamlet, by Ryan North (author of Dinosaur Comics and other randomness)

in my area seems like that all companies develop for Microsoft

I am not looking a new job. I would like to learn software development because it seems to me more complicated and fascinating than building a website.

If you aren't immediately looking for a new job, then I'd avoid the Microsoft stack, frankly, especially if you are a mac user. The linux-based development world tends to have a lot more free tools and easy options, and a much lower learning curve for people not already running Windows.

One option is to get a copy of Seven languages in seven weeks and work through the languages listed - maybe that will help clarify your mind as to what kind of thing you want to learn in more detail.

My personal favourite language is Clojure, but I've been a coder for a long time, so I can't really say how it would be for a learning language for you. But it's a great mix of a solid functional programming language, with a pragmatic approach to getting real-world stuff done, and a big community behind it. </plug>

I'm a fan of clojurescript - it's great to bring some of the power of clojure to the browser - compile-time macros, efficient immutable data types, asynchronous programming a-la goroutines.

It's still definitely a niche language - I'd mostly use it if I had a team who already know clojure, or if I needed something quite complex in the browser. But tools like om which provide a functional wrapper around React are looking awesome, and might give clojurescript some more widespread appeal.

A great talk indeed. I also love "Simple Made Easy", which is more concrete: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy