[PLUG] Teaching My Son To Program

Ed Sawicki ed at alcpress.com
Thu Sep 25 10:17:02 UTC 2003


On Thu, 2003-09-25 at 09:46, Greg R. wrote:
> Why not JavaScript? Okay, sure, it's a buggy, ridiculous language, but 
> there are some nice features - write a script to change the browsers 
> color, things like that. Since it works within a web browser, there's an 
> immediate sort of buy-in for beginners - it's not like you have to go 
> through the process of explaining the command line. Plus, syntactically, 
> it will provide somewhat of a bridge to Perl, Java, and C.
> Jon Jacob wrote:
> 
> >My son is turning nine next month and wants me to teach him how to
> >program.  This is something I used to do (Perl mostly) but have lost my
> >way.  Nonetheless, he has an interest and I would love to show him
> >without turning him off.


One of my associates used to teach SQL as a user's first
language. He claimed that users learned interesting and
useful things right from the start - unlike the less than
useful "hello world" exercises commonly done when starting
to learn other languages.

Ed





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