Re: OFF TOPIC -- Starter programming language for a brilliant child

["M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 12:19 PM, Matthias Kluwe <mkluwe@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> I don't think children need a programming language especially
> appropiate for children. If they find the topic interesting, almost
> anything will do. If they don't, well...
>
> It does not damage your brain to get started with programming using
> some BASIC dialect and 6502 assembler afterwards, even when you're
> under ten years old, as an example of former times.
>
> Regards,
> Matthias
>

Well ... maybe, maybe not:

1. Logo was designed for children - a dialect of Lisp
2. Scratch was designed for children - a Python IDE, which was adapted
to Android Java for mobile app development
3. Squeak was designed for everyone - an age-independent Smalltalk
environment. As I understand it, eToys is essentially the full Squeak
with some 'corners cut' to fit in the 256 MB OLPC XO. That is, I don't
think they changed much of the core or the UI; they just made it run
in a smaller machine.
4. BASIC was designed for Dartmouth undergrads. It's essentially an
interactive dialect of FORTRAN with most of the things that make
FORTRAN usable by professional programmers.

I personally think kids' languages, or at least kid-friendly IDEs on
top of a professional-grade language, are far better than either BASIC
or assembler for that age group. So I would give the highest grades to
Scratch and eToys/Squeak.

-- 
Twitter: http://twitter.com/znmeb; Computational Journalism Publishers Workbench
http://j.mp/CompJournBench/

I am not an IP address! I am a free man!