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Comment by myth_buster | Hacker News Reader

  Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like 
  they are walking around in a byzantine museum, afraid to touch 
  things, while DrRacket feels closer to old-school personal computers 
  where you felt like you were in command of the machine.

I think this is a very important observation. As with most things, it's extremely important to get in during the humble beginning stage and then tracing your way up to grok more complicated systems. Similar to the "first principle" approach.

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My 7 year old is learning on a Raspberry Pi that does not load X by default. She gets around the terminal pretty well (changing, dirs, calling python scripts, etc.). The GUI is just overwhelming at this point. She prefers the terminal. In fact, she will boot it up and type:

    nano story.txt

To start writing simple stories (she loves doing that). And yes, she saves it by pressing Ctrl-x, y, and enter. :D

I still feel the same way as your daughter.

I find this fascinating given that kids are exposed to things like the iPads which are purely graphical

She has an iPad, but treats it like I used to treat a TV back when I was her age in the 80s. The RPi is to her what the C64 was to me. Tablets and phones are entertainment (read music, video and games) gadgets. The RPi is more like something to tinker with. However, just like Carmack's son, the environment where she learns is heavily biased towards technology. Having designed and built her own little robot at age six because I build robots myself. She also breadboards for fun because all the required parts are at her reach. If I had a quarter for every LED she has burnt...

very cool, thanks for sharing

I had one of those "I must be getting old!" moments (I'm not that old, but still!). My niece is four and she's had iPads pretty much forever, so it was funny watching her sit at my desktop machine and immediately start swiping at the screen trying to drag things around and having the most puzzled look on her face of "why isn't this doing anything?".

Keyboard.... how quaint! :)

I was a keyboard only user back in the day, but I've spent too long on touch screen laptops, and now find myself getting frustrated every time I'm dropped behind a non touch laptop. Every single time I find myself tapping the screen to dismiss a dialog. I guess it's what you're used to that determines what you find user friendly.

Its happened to my kid, too. What really shocked me is telling her that books were what existed before the internet. Her response? "There was no youtube?"

You can set a Raspberry Pi to boot straight into Scratch. It's a great introductory graphical programming language.

The next step is usually Python but I'm not sure kids will get the significant whitespace. Go is an option or maybe BASIC (on RISC OS perhaps).

We tried scratch, but it bored her for whatever reason. Its a nice environment, though. Python is something she is slowly learning through command line games like rock, paper, scissors. Go, well, I don't want to have her suffer through Go's syntax just yet. BASIC is outdated and too verbose. She has typed C code before and found it fun. Dunno, I don't want her to be anything but herself. This is just a way to spend time together.

You might find some hardware add-ons make it more fun. GPIO is the killer feature of the Pi. You can use a lot of the HATs from Scratch as well as Python. http://wiki.scratch.mit.edu/wiki/Hardware_That_Can_Connect_t...

I do plan to introduce her to GPIO stuff. Maybe mix it in with a video game of sorts. She does have experience with the Arduino, so the concept of sensors is not new to her.

It's kind of out of place in a pure text environment, but Processing[1] might be fun to play with. It's designed for visual arts.

[1]: https://processing.org/

There is nothing harder to understand about indentation levels than curly braces, if you haven't already developed a preference for curly braces. Go is really not designed as a tool for new programmers, you are just projecting your preferences onto kids.

Python can be a handful due to the weird whitespace rules. Its one of the things I hate about the language, and I use it every day. Dunno if I'd put curly braces in it, but the Hy language (a pseudo lisp in pythonish) really feels good to these old eyes.

Haskell has similar whitespace rules to Python, and no one ever complains about them.

(Haskell does support {} and ; for those in need, though. Also, it has lots of other stuff for people to complain about first.)

You answer yourself - it has too many other issues for people to complain about. And its terseness prevents most of us from ever seriously using it.

>There is nothing harder to understand about indentation levels than curly braces //

At the start of this year I finished a first course in Python to learn in anticipation of [possibly] using it for home learning with my kids (it seems widely used for education). As I'm familiar with programming I searched for an IDE as I started. It told me when I had dropped a space or used a tab by accident. I tried several different environments including my standard editor choices - nano and Kate - revealing non-printing characters was a clear advantage. Others (primarily adults) who were starting fresh in programming had lots of problems with errant spaces.

With braces you can see more clearly when there is an error of addition or omission, not so much with spaces. Like I tried to say above: this is clearly tractable with the right tools but the demarcation - I feel - of braces can be a more clear and obvious sign of separation than whitespace. For younger people with less spatial reasoning and less accurate perception of text lining up it rather seems it could be pretty much harder to use whitespace structuring.

Personally I like the overall "clean" appearance of Python compared to PHP (say), debugging with tools is fine, when I was testing different environments and tripped on whitespace problems it was a nightmare rather reminiscent of trying to debug HTML tables some years back.

My intuition is that indentation is more readily apparent. You can tell that a group of lines or an individual line is indented or not at a glance. It's natural to see that they are grouped. With braces, you have to search for the opening and closing brace, and furthermore you must search within those braces to ensure another brace set isn't being opened, in case you missed one. You have to learn both -- about how to designate a set of statements as grouped using opening and closing braces, and how to detect a common class of errors related to nesting braces.

The thing is, those of us who prefer braces or other syntax elements also indent. It's not either/or. I want the redundancy. I can more easily see how things line up.

> With braces, you have to search for the opening and closing brace

It's probably been 20-30 years since I used an editor that couldn't highlight the matching brace, and that wouldn't show me which opening brace the closing brace I just put down matches up with.

But it's just been a day since the last cut and paste "accident" left me with a badly mis-indented piece of code... which I happily could auto-format back to sanity with a couple of keystrokes because the indentation was not all the editor had to go by.

Never used Go although I've used a lot of C style languages that use braces and line terminators. I also use Python and like it a lot.

My hesitation for using it with kids comes from anecdotal evidence (both written and in person). Kids seem to have trouble with significant whitespace (such as with Python ifs/loops/functions).

It may be better to use BASIC or Ruby. This way you avoid many of the braces and semicolons. You can still end a line with just a CR/LF but it makes it obvious where statements, functions and loops end.

>Go is an option

Drink the koolaid, fine, but don't drink THAT MUCH of the koolaid.

Never used Go and have no plans to in the near future either. I have found C to be a useful training language but it can get tricky once you get to pointers.

Just not discounting Go based on what I've read. e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10054270

One very good option that I haven't seen mentioned yet is Love2D. It is basically Lua with solid game libraries wrapped into very simple interfaces. load sound, play sound. load image, display image, etc. while under the hood is SDL, DevIL and other libs that make it run fast.

I am so jealous when I hear these damn stories. Another 5 or more years to go.

Does anyone have a book about the method they develop? I bet that, following it to the T or not, it would sell here with the HN crowd.

I started putting together a "book" when I was teaching my 6 year old a bit about coding. It uses a BBC Micro emulator and BBC BASIC as the intro language. Never got around to finishing it... http://c4k.rabidgremlin.com/

However it did encourage him to want to make games... this is the first one: http://ackson.nz/

I did the coding but it was his concept, he did all the graphics (scanned pictures he drew), the font (generated from his handwriting) and sound effects (that's him making all the sounds).

He also built the levels and used a music generator to create the background music (not in the version that is on the website yet). This was all done in Unity with a lot of prefabs to make it easy for him to build the levels.

I'm totally going to introduce him to PICO-8 (see link below) next to see how he gets on :)

holy camoly that is adorable!

Totally.. he even invented the company "Ackson" (for Ackerman & Son) and the company logo you can see in the corner of the main screen (him and I holding hands).

He is a pretty awesome kid :)

Nice game! Its super fun. Wll be playing it with my kid when she gets home later today. May you share the source code? I haven't dabbed in unity and it would be nice to see how you built it (and maybe hack it a bit).

Glad you liked it. He'll be super-stoked to know that people are playing his game :)

I'll see what I can do re sharing the source code...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzuki_method may be adapted for programming.

As opposed to Ctrl-o, y, enter?

> And yes, she saves it by pressing Ctrl-x, y, and enter. :D

As a child there is no bias as to 'oh it must be hard doing that because I am use to clicking X in Windows' they just learn stuff and get on with it. We should all remember to be like children sometimes. Explore ... not language wars!

That is super awesome.

Something like PICO-8 would work great for young programmers I think http://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php

I had never seen that, thank you!

It Rocks. Bought it yesterday, had a simple game up and running in 10 minutes....and 80's flashbacks the rest of the day :)

This is amazing, I was looking for something similar for my son. Thank you so much for that link.

I can't wait to get home from work to try this, looks awesome!!

I've been looking for something that gives a modern, live-coding-ish experience similar to how you used to program in BASIC on the Commodore 64. No clutter, a fullscreen immediate editor/REPL in one window, nice big text, etc.

The closest I've found to what I'm after (until now that is) is (fluxus) (http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus/). Would really really love to hear of any others.

Three environments are hitting the "close-enough" mark for me.

1. http://elm-lang.org/try 2. Clojurescript + figwheel + reagent. 3. ipython notebook

How widespeard of a belief is this in the teaching community? I happen to completely agree with it, but I've also heard the opposite -- suggestions that dropping kids into professional coding environments would give them the feeling they were doing something "for real" and help motivate them. I feel that the cognitive load of these kinds of environments is so high, and the possibility to click something that breaks everything unexplainably so great, that introducing kids to programming using systems whose environment they could completely comprehend seemed like a no-brainer. Was wondering if there was evidence to this intution (or contrary to it).

The school where I work at is incidentally piloting a intro to computer programming course that uses Blender and Python for completely green 10yr olds. I don't see this turning out well; how doesn't it just devolve into a CTRL-C/CTRL-V bonanza?

The only evidence I have is that game for adults called `Word'. I strongly believe they would be much better players if they sticked to Wordpad for a year or two before switching to Word (they might then realize they don't need it 99.9999% of the time).

I've switched to markdown for most of my personal stuff. In Word my typing content to formatting content was around 60/40. In markdown I format as I type and it's maybe 5% tops.

If you're like me and find yourself typing mostly the same few document types over and over it pays to spend a few hours and set up a latex template.

I've had a good bit of luck using Pandoc to fill in my latex templates from a markdown file.

This is just a personal anecdote, but my first experience with programming was in an introductory CS course where Visual Studio was the default (but not mandatory) dev environment. Naturally, I used it instead of any CLI because I was an absolute beginner.

This is coming from someone who loves VS, but it is not something beginners should have to deal with. Some of my questions that distracted me from actually solving problems (note the technically incorrect usage of certain terms; this is intentional):

- Why is the options menu so huge?

- What the hell is a project?

- Oh my god I clicked in the thing and this red ball popped up and now the code won't move past it!

- Why do I need to build the project? Can't I just run my code in the file?

- Why do new menus pop up when I click "Run"?

- What the hell does "step into" and "step over" mean?

I think that a CLI or super basic IDE with minimal options and capabilities is the way to go when dealing with people who are beginners. On that same note, I do find it disheartening that many upper-division courses at college never bother with IDEs, and teachers tell students to just "figure it out on your own".

Yeah, a good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "What am I trying to learn, an IDE or programming?"

Both are valuable to know, but teaching someone how to be a mechanic without ever having them drive a car is a bit of a mess.

SmallBasic is probably a good idea for young students working through these problems.

I'm a big fan of VS for C# and IntelliJ for Java. Neither of these are Babby's First IDE, but once you have mastered the basic ideas of working in an IDE they pretty much work the way you would expect.

JetBrains' other IDEs and plugins have also been uniformly excellent, in my experience. The VC++ parts of VS are a lot rougher, but I suppose that's to be expected.

FWIW, I am a professional coder, and find Eclipse bewildering.

Same. Seriously, it's a fantastic example of "user interface designed by an engineer". It's not that I don't understand how to use Eclipse - sadly, it's an editor I have spent all too much time working with in various incarnations/skins. It's incredibly powerful and extensible (which unfortunately leads to it being used as a base for further IDEs built on top of it), it's just incredibly painful and unintuitive to use. You can do literally anything, it'll just be buried five menus deep inside some control panel.

Today I fired up Android Studio for the first time, and I literally cracked a smile and did a fistpump when I saw IntelliJ staring back at me instead of fucking Eclipse.

Android Studio has been the reason I've made $200+ of JetBrains purchases for personal use. I hope it's working out well for them.

Another vote of confidence for JetBrains here. Making the jump from Eclipse to phpStorm for Magento development was worth every single penny!

My experience TA'ing a classroom full of CS110 (introduction to programming for CS majors, taught in Java) was that the cognitive load of Eclipse was indeed very high. Most people preferred Netbeans. The people who did prefer Eclipse were the high-flyers who had done programming or worked in it previously.

Unfortunately I have found that NetBeans is often missing some functionality around the edges. For example, it doesn't support parameterized JUnit tests (they run, they count towards success/failure, but don't display in the GUI). That's not exactly new functionality either, they've been around since what, 2010? It's a shame because Netbeans is definitely a more polished environment.

I would suggest that you check out PyCharm and see if it suits your needs. Everything I've tried by JetBrains has been absolutely fantastic.

Well depends what do you want to teach :)

I personally was introduced to programming as a hobby when I was 10y old, in an after-school class, where we used visual basic for applications. This was early 2000's and VBA editor bundled with every Office was suprisingly decent, and I remember quite fondly creatin random poem-generators spamming endless streams of message boxes :D So, if they manage to make their way around some thing ordinary but complex such as spreadsheet/presentation editor, I don't think bloated IDE's would be too much of a hinderance.

So even though in principle, I like the simplicity of repl for teaching somebody, my afternoon class 15 years ago didn't have problem with the "high cognitive load" :)

Regarding blender ... If you want to teach them basics of graphics/3d modeling first and then showcase the basic, and make them interactive with its drag&drop/node-based actor model ... it might be fun. But I haven't used blender in more than 5 years, so I don't really know, how much it supports the "game-dev-teaching" angle.

Is the Blender Game Engine workflow mostly like shown in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5HEyoDb-tw&index=64&list=PL...

I don't understand the appeal of learning programming without the beginning programmer being in charge of control flow.

Attaching scripts to things is useful for people with skills in using 3D tools, but now you have to introduce them to the concept of writing functions to be executed repeatedly in a loop without them being able to see the loop.

Student: How does it know to keep running my script?

Teacher: It runs every frame in a loop.

S: What's a loop?

T: teaches loops

S: Where's the loop that runs my script?

T: Deep inside the bowels of Blender.

S: Oh.

> suggestions that dropping kids into professional coding environments would give them the feeling they were doing something "for real" and help motivate them

People that say this have almost never actually tried to teach kids programming from scratch. Throw someone in the ocean and they will drown. Build up starting in a kiddie pool and after practice, they could be a life guard.

The same thing happens with computer science all the time. The very first thing taught is C++. I can't think of anything worse for someone who hasn't ever seen an if statement or a loop than to burden them with a deluge of functions whos motivations aren't clear until programming a large project for two years.

> Dropping a newbie into Eclipse or MonoDevelop makes them feel like they are walking around in a byzantine museum

I tried really hard to use and like free/open source IDEs like Eclipse, Aptana, and Netbeans. They all felt clunky, didn't work, or worse took away features in later versions. I finally forked out the money for PHPStorm, PyCharm, and IntelliJ and it's been the best money I've ever spent. Trying to learn the internals of indefero using vi was a challenge (with file_put_contents as a debugging mechanism...) - but once I figured out how to use xdebug in PHPStorm it's just been amazing. It has the feel of Visual Studio without the extra bloat.

Haha. You began listing off the IDEs, and I was going to post suggesting the IntelliJ line. There are still some clunky annoyances and bloat in the software, but overall it is the best line of editors I have ever used.

You say you've forked out money for both PHPStorm/PyCharm and the expensive IntelliJ. I thought IntelliJ automatically supports all the language addons, so why separate copies of the language-specific bundles? Am I wrong about IntelliJ, or did you just happen to buy that one last?

Well I have a mix of their free licenses (for open source projects) and paid licenses. I did pay for PyCharm and PHPStorm (and upgrades). Needless to say I do use commercial versions of all of them on an almost daily basis and I couldn't use anything else.

I could be wrong - but the way I understand IntelliJ language plugins is just really code autocomplete/syntax highlighting. PyCharm and PHPstorm have strong integration with the languages (debugging, inspectors, etc).

As an aside - for an individual license for IntelliJ $200 isn't a lot. Totally not rubbing it in but I've spent thousands of dollars on Visual Studio subscriptions (and I think they gave me a lifetime subscription of $50/month to Azure...). Check out bizspark - I definitely recommend it. Microsoft even waived the graduation fee for me.

I think of it as "hockey-stick difficulty". You need to start super easy so you know you're set up correctly, and then you can ramp as hard as you can to launch.

Works really well with systems built from many simple parts, too. Learn the bag of small pieces (linear) then jump in and go crazy with the combinations (exponential).

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