Programming language for children

[Gilles Gravier]

If you want a language that is simple, you could try Pascal. Good to
teach the basics of programming, and good practices.

If not, you have languages like LOGO which are very simple, and geared
ONLY at teaching programming, but not programming real applications. You
can do things like move sprites, draw lines...

Then move on to Prolog and/or SmallTalk. :)

Don't do BASIC. It teaches all the bad things you can imagine... :)

Gilles.

Knapp wrote:
> C is a really hard language for a beginner. It has memory problems
> like heap, it has pointers, pointers to pointers, it has code that is
> hard to read, it is compiled.
>
> Kids like things they can see. I like the robot idea because the kids
> can see what happens if I do this . . . I learned with the C64 basic
> and then assembly also. What made this great was that it was all
> visual. Move a sprite, draw a line (I wrote the line command in
> assembly), play a sound. You can't do this with C, without some work,
> a graphics lib and a lot of compile time. Python is a really good
> basic language. C is a really good pro language, C++ is at least a bit
> easier than C; with memory and it is OOP.
>
> Kids will spend 1000s of hours learning, IF THEY LIKE IT.
>