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Introducing Programming to a Child

posted by martyb on Thursday December 03 2015, @11:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the making-introductions dept.

Justin Case writes:

My 9 year old girl has expressed an interest in learning to program. Of course I want something that will give her short term rewards, but still teach solid skills. I know this question gets asked from time to time on various forums but I wanted to get some opinions from the good people of SN.

Christmas is coming... she's (for now) a Windows user... is there something you'd recommend as a gift?

Thanks for your ideas.

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  • (Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:34PM

    by mendax (2840) on Thursday December 03 2015, @08:34PM (#271545)

    BASIC, real BASIC with line numbers, not Visual Basic, has been out of favor for a long time. Fortran? What does Fortran have to offer over other high level languages? Better handling of advanced math that children won't have learned yet?

    I'm not suggesting that kids use the old-fashioned Basic or Fortran now. I just used them as examples of languages that were pretty simple in their day because didn't require you to mess around with such awful things as garbage collection or pointers, and it is simplicity that kids should start with so they don't get frustrated and find something more fun to do.

    In defense of Perl, Perl is an incredibly powerful language, like pretty much all the scripting languages today, but that doesn't mean that the kid has to make use of those features. It's not too difficult to skip over most of the frustrating shit. Actually, I think a kid would find regular expressions to be quite fascinating. Simple regular expressions are very straightforward and any bonehead can understand them.

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