Interview with Peteris Krumins | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Peteris Krumins

lambdaphant.com

19 pointspkrumins5 comments

I started out in VB too, when I was 12-13 years old.

While I wouldn't touch the language with a 10ft barge pole today, I do credit it for kicking off my interest in programming and ultimately my career. I agree with Peteris that kids do like the instant results you get with a very RAD like environment such as VB.

I personally think that Python fills the goal of instant validation quite well for children. There's an interactive interpreter and very little setup for your first program (as opposed to Java's public static void main(String[] args) before even reaching "Hello World").

I help run a summer school[1] for high school students (many of whom have never programmed) and within a few days they can start putting together fairly complicated programs. One for example created an anagram solver for an online game literally within a day of learning what a program was and two or three days later their team had created a simple web crawler as the basis of their from-scratch search engine.

I think as long as they see a way to solve their own problems you'll hold attention long enough to get them self sufficient.

[1] National Computer Science School - www.ncss.edu.au

Yeah, to clarify my original comment, back then I found VB very rewarding to work with as a child because you got instant results with buttons to press, textboxes to type in and so on.

I think nowadays it would be counter productive to teach children VB, the toolkits and languages out there today are a lot more robust an accessible in comparison to what it was like when I was learning to program

I started with HTML, then C++ (of all things). I think I'd still recommend the web trifecta (HTML/CSS/Javascript), it's really easy to build something you can share with your friends. Even if it's just a static site, it's awesome to have something like that.

Part of me wishes I had been around during the heyday of BASIC. I hear a lot of people got their start that way, and even if it looks a bit ugly now, I'm sure it was a fascinating introduction to the digital frontier.

I guess I'm showing my age, but I started out in BASICA on my Compaq Deskpro and later graduated to QBASIC.

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