Suppose that a child, about 10 years old, is about to start playing around with programming. Which language would be good to start with? Please explain why in comments.
@cnx
@roboneko
@residuum
@bonifartius
@dylanvanassche
@farnerup
Thanks for all the suggestions!
Scratch and Snap are interesting but there is something making me skeptical to things with lots of graphics. Very possible that this is just me being old-fashioned but my feeling is anyway that, I fear that too much "wow, cool colourful explosions on my screen, I want more of that!" risks taking focus from the programming itself.
I mean, programming is not actually about graphics.
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@cnx @roboneko @residuum @bonifartius @dylanvanassche @farnerup
I would like the feeling to be "wow, now I Just learned how to use an if-statement! And I can nest them! Wow, I can do so much with this!"
Having said that, I will look closer at Scratch and Snap and similar. Admittedly, I don't know them and it's very possible that I was above just arguing against them to avoid having to learn something new myself. 🙂
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@eliasr @cnx @roboneko @residuum @bonifartius @dylanvanassche I think it is important for the first programming language not to have too many features. E.g. basic is a terrible language for doing serious development, but I could learn it in a day and then I felt like I was only limited by my imagination.
You get a taste of what programming is like and then move on to a "real" programming language.