Re: Fw: Re: junior-programming
Just a few of my own comments here ; )
I agree that fond memories of Basic had more to do with learning programming
that Basic itself. I've never thought of Basic as a 'REAL' programming language
anyway.
<Historical Diversion>
Beginners
All-purpose
Symbolic
Instructional
Code
Was developed to teach the concepts of programming. Somewhere along the way,
people forgot that it was not a programming language. This was also before the
great 'GOTO Eradication movement' which spawned the development of Pascal,
another 'Teaching' Language carefully designed to stop people from using GOTO
commands that made 'Spaghetti code' the nightmare it became.
</Historical Diversion>
So, when I get some time, I'll have a look and installing junior-programming on
my daughters PC and see what she thinks of it.
>That leaves us with logo, python, and drscheme. Is this sufficient?
I've never worked with any of these myself, so it will be a real proof of the
documentation if we can really learn and use these languages.
What about c/c++?
I realise that these are considered 'Advanced' for early learners and the write,
compile, test repeat process can be a bit hard for the younger, but with c/c++
being the back-bone of EVERY computer system bar Forth systems, It seems to
valuable to leave out. I've heard that Python is enough like c to be a good way
to get started, but would it really cost that much to include c/c++ for when the
learner is ready to try it out?
The other consideration is documentation and tutorials. I've down-loaded and
read more tutorials that google can find. Most of them were not worth the paper
I didn't bother to print them onto. As I am in my first year of a programming
course, I'll be able to offer a little help for my daughter, but after that,
I'll need as much help learning as she will. I was wondering if anyone had a
good source for tutorials or was willing to write up some stuff for including?
At least now that my daughter's system is Progeny, not Mandrake, if will be much
easier to try the junior packages for her. Thanks for all the work and keep
fighting for the kids for all of us. The sooner they learn how to use a real
system, the less satisfied future generations will be with the faulty systems
that are taken for granted now.
Cheers,
John Gay
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