Kojo - Scala for Kids | Hacker News Reader

Kojo - Scala for Kids

scala-lang.org

14 pointsskorks4 comments

Whoa. It takes more than a turtle to make a Logo. The neat thing about Logo was that kids, even at an extremely young age, could leverage their budding English language skills to do some amazing things in very Lisp-y ways, starting with something as simple as "tell turtle go up 5" and seeing that work. No defs, no need to build scaffolding of any kind to get immediate feedback. This may be simple, but there'd be a lot of hand-holding needed for the little 'uns.

Well, according to the docs, the following code works:

repeat (4) {

    forward(100) 

    right()

}

which implies that a lot of the usual Scala scaffolding can be omitted (kind of like immediate mode in Processing, which lets you eliminate most Java boilerplate for simple drawing tasks).

Haven't actually played with it myself, though, so I can't comment further...

Looks very interesting, in any case. I was excited when a Scala version of the Processing environment was released, but that project seems to have been abandoned (or rather, it was only a proof of concept anyways), so it's nice to see someone run full steam ahead with the idea.

My opinion on Scala is that while it's a much nicer language than Java, it's going to be quite difficult to pick up unless you have previous programming experience in at least one of Java or an ML-like language. If this can successfully teach kids Scala as a first language I'm very, very impressed.

Scala as a first programming language? Whoo. Scala is the richest language I've interacted with so far.

But then again you can't underestimate motivated kids with infinite free time. I certainly remember that my own abilities were vastly underestimated when I was a youngling.

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