Programming language for children

[Piper]

All of the languages referred to so far overlap greatly in what they 
accomplish. IMO it is not just C which is "for the birds" but every other 
language of the machine too. However, I did phone MS and they walked me 
through the compiling of a C program with .NET over the telephone.

You need to talk to your daughters about the birds and the bees.

Also talk about cryptography and what the word "cryptic" means.

First you tell your daughters what languages of the machine from binary to 
C++ accomplish. Then you ask them to write out a menu of what you have said. 
Then tell them to write a new language of the machine called "BEE" to 
accomplish those things. BEE will be intermediate between your native 
language (Swedish?) and C, FORTRAN, APL etc.

For example, item 1 on the menu might be Bzzzzzz. Item 50 might be Bzz Bzzz 
Bzzzzzz etc.

Augie Hansen (as quoted recently) is correct. Programming is not the same as 
code writing.

Given that code writing can be rationally and scientifically articulated, it 
can be "sketched out" in some kind of pre-code plan.
Then the .NET SW can give us your daughters' menu which also asks which 
language we want used for the code which .NET returns.

Meanwhile code writing is a make-work exercise to keep some people buzzing 
around and staying busy as bees who might otherwise be socially troublesome.

The managers at MS will pay your daughters a lot of money to NOT come 
forward with the BEE language. What will they do with all those unemployed 
code writers?

Piper

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Knapp" <magick.crow at gmail.com>
To: "Ubuntu user technical support, not for general discussions" 
<ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com>
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 1:46 AM
Subject: Re: Programming language for children


>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.
> -- 
> Douglas E Knapp
>
> Why do we live?
>
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