On Nov 11, 2006, at 9:00 AM, Michael Torrie wrote:
<snip>
Anyway, our modern IDEs are similar to what Borland started, but
way to
complicated to get a young child started on, in my opinion. I think
bringing back integrated, interpreted, immediate environments like
BASIC-256 is a good idea. The Logo environment is also great. Seems
to me our modern languages such as Java, C#, C++ don't lend themselves
well to a 5 year old (which is when I started programming). Python
just
might, though, except that a 5-8 year old may not always understand
the
concept of white space. And I do think it is important to first teach
procedural programming first. OOP and event-driven are great, but as
the computer itself is procedural, if we want to teach budding
computer
scientists how computers actually work inside, we need to start on
procedural programming (and polling), then probably event-driven (help
them understand interrupt-driven stuff), and then introduce them to
other artificial abstractions that they will eventually use
exclusively.
I'm amazed none of the other rubyists mentioned this[1] yet. :)
It's a fully interactive ruby environment, with walkthroughs and
Why's delectable humor to boot.
1. http://tryruby.hobix.com/
-Blake
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