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Comment by robertskmiles | Hacker News Reader

> What we don't need is to teach a specific language. Any language will do.

Except BASIC. Anything but BASIC.

If I had to pick a language to teach 9-10 year olds, I'd probably go with Python. Of the 'real languages' (by which I mean languages substantially used in industry/academia for real applications), I think python has the least overhead to get your head around before you can write functioning code.

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Python sure. Moving into... Ruby possibly, or potentially PHP (if you combine it with one of the better/easier frameworks) and then HTML.

The latter ones because you can start to get them to deploy/work on websites. Being able to write websites is a generally useful skill nowadays (even if you don't go into programming.. all my family need/want websites, for example).

I teach an after school IT club and a project to maintain/develop a site on the school intranet has consistently been the favourite :) Because it's something functional and visible!

(and also a good opportunity to teach about security issues what with the trial-by-fire environment a school brings :D)

EDIT: the other good thing about web-dev is that it needs a few different skills - design, back-end coding, infrastructure/sysops and databases which a) gives them a taster of all the career opportunities and b) lets different people "shine" in different areas, and contribute their strongest skill to the final project.

When you get to know Python, you don't need to "move into" Ruby or (shudder) PHP. It's much easier to learn a web programming framework in Python and how to deploy it, rather than to learn how your second programming language differs from Python.

The sad state of client-side programming is that you need to learn a lot about the messy world of HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Come to think of it, CoffeeScript might be a good language to start with today?

shrug

In my experience PHP or Ruby is generally a better/easier web programming experience (I tried Python but it never really clicked with the kids).

Python is a good general purpose language though.

While I prefer Ruby to Python, Ruby has horrible documentation and therefore is quite painful to learn. You pretty much need to buy a couple of books.

BASIC worked just fine as a first language for most people who grew up in the 80s.

But as I said earlier in the thread. We shouldn't teach them programming, or specific languages. We should teach them general problem solving.

You know what's fun, programming. You know what's not fun, general problem solving. You've got it all backwards. I learned to program when I was 8 years old reading books and modifying games in BASIC. It was a great time. I never considering it work.

I was the same (well it wasn't BASIC, I was 8 in 1998). Programming is fun, and I never considered it work, but I don't think you and I were typical 8 year olds. Not sure if general problem solving is more fun, but you're implying 'programming is fun for 8 year olds', which may not hold true for all 8 year olds.

I was blessed to have a very good highschool computing science teacher -- the class was a good mix of boys and girls and those experienced and inexperienced and in the end everyone produced some really neat games and had a great time.

I've taught my daughter a little bit of programming when she was younger -- I tried her with Visual Basic and we built a app that did some computation -- and she really enjoyed it. It gave her an appreciation for what I do.

So I really think that programming is generally an enjoyable experience. That's not to say we aren't exceptional, but there are exceptional people in all sorts of pursuits.

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