Ah, no, I never said that I felt it was the *right* match for children...
however my children have been programming their Legos with Lego MindStorms,
and have taken Scratch classes (and MineCraft circuits... learned boolean
logic at age 7 ;-) ) at Einstein's Workshop already...
(It's in Burlington, MA, if you live in the area, and have kids of any
age... even 50+ year old kids ;-), it's a wonderful place... esp. if your
kids take after you, and are really into math/science...)
Since he already had learned some Lua, and he *really* wants me to teach
him Julia, I figured the better path would be to teach what I could to him,
instead of stifling his curiosity / ingenuity...
I will try to gently guide him to other things, as you recommended, better
suited to children, but if he still wants to know about Julia, far be it
for me to stop him!
(he was really excited about string interpolation this morning! His first
Julia code:
```julia
name = "Alex"
print("My name is $name")
```
He wants me to tell him what corresponds to Lua's tables in Julia after
school...)
I thought IJulia would do well for the sort of "progressive interactive
development" that he'd be doing...
Thanks for the response!
Scott
On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 10:16:00 AM UTC-4, Tamas Papp wrote:
>
> Julia is a great language, but I am wondering why you think it is the
> right match for children. IMO the comparative advantages of Julia are
> 1. parametric polymorphism,
> 2. macros,
> 3. ability to generate very fast code with very little help.
> I don't think that any of these appeal very much to beginners, and
> especially not to children.
>
> At the moment Julia is comparatively weak in
> a. graphics,
> b. debugging (especially the kind aided by the IDE),
> c. progressive interactive development.
> I imagine that these would be very important to anyone learning to
> program, including children. Several languages have variations that provide
> these, eg Scheme (Racket, formerly PLT Scheme), or Python; there are
> corresponding books for children, etc.
>
> Best,
>
> Tamas
>
> On Thursday, May 7, 2015 at 2:00:30 PM UTC+2, Scott Jones wrote:
>>
>> Has anybody had any experience teaching Julia to kids?
>> This is *not* a joke, my almost 9 year old son has a science project due
>> next week.
>> He knows some Lua (which he originally learned from the ComputerCraft mod
>> in MineCraft, and then using the Codea
>> app for the iPad), but he's seen how I've fallen in love with Julia, and
>> he wants to use Julia for his project
>> (which is doing some tests of peoples visual and auditory memory, using
>> random 7 digit sequences,
>> and then doing some simple calculations on the results...).
>> He's basically a lazy boy [see the following link, to understand that
>> that is the highest complement I pay people :-) (see
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love#The_Tale_of_the_Man_Who_Was_Too_Lazy_to_Fail
>> ]
>> and he wants the computer to do a lot of his work for him...
>>
>>
>>
