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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

> I learned to program when I was pretty young, the only time stuff like scratch makes sense is kindergarden when you're still learning to read (for me it was the mindstorms stuff.)

> I was using Turbo Pascal when I was 11.

Ignoring the fact that the whole stack was way much easier back in the day (I was a Turbo Pascal user as well at more or less your age), to me it's also a pretty clear case of survivorship bias. There will be kids that will find their way into no matter what, but we should also give tools/resources to help other kids without the same level of interest+capabilities to at least scratch the surface.

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I absolutely loved Turbo Pascal as a kid and hold that IDE as the golden standard still to this day because of its simplicity. I think what we need isn't visual tools, we need an extremely simple IDE where you press one button (F5) to run your program without leaving the environment and without any clutter.

The modern FreePascal stack includes a very similar text-based IDE; and FreeDOS still provides RHIDE for C programming. It would be nice to have a modern clone of these vintage IDE's with full support for language-independent tools like LSP, treesitter and the common debug protocol. From what I can gather, such a tool would be highly usable, e.g. over SSH connections that still work with a terminal-like UX, even for novice users who might be less familiar with tools like Vim.

I wonder if Turbo Pascal was any easier to get started with than Rust would be with the right GUI toolkit and IDE.

There's also some ongoing work on Rust REPL, see https://github.com/google/evcxr - though it's still a bit of a hack. Might become even easier than Turbo Pascal itself, and comparable to home computer BASICs.

When is "the day"? I was using Java and PHP as a 12 year old in the 00s. Honestly with the likes of WSL and (hated as they are), curl | sh installers or exes that don't require pissing about with the environment variables window, it's arguably easier to get started with a real programming language now than the 00s.

When is the day, indeed? I learned programming using Kemeny and Kurtz BASIC in the late 1960s. I have long since lost count of the number of languages I've learned well enough to write production code in, but it's somewhere North of 2 dozen. All built on the basic mental equipment I developed with that primitive BASIC - a sense for the relationship and interaction of three basic elements: symbolic code expressing structure and control; algorithm; and data, in and out. This is what a children's language should aim for - making the onramp to that mental landscape as accessible and responsive as possible. You don't need lambda calculus for that, any more than you need group theory or complex analysis to bring the joy and power of arithmetic and math to young minds. The superstructure will follow, if you get the foundation right.

I was referring to understanding (more or less) the whole stack, down to the hardware. Getting started is probably easier today (because of the Internet) than how it was... back in the day, where you need to have some kind of physical contact and where you lived mattered a lot. But anyway, this wasn't my main point.

I know a guy who learned Standard ML when he was 11.

I also know a bunch of smart guys who dropped out of comp sci at Uni because that's what they were taught in their first semester. Some of them became developers anyway, others decided that they would never learn to code and did other things instead (which is fine, of course, but I'm sure they could've learned Python first and moved on to SML later).

Maybe those same uni students would have been more successful with Standard ML if they had learned it at a younger age, when they could more easily learn new things. For that matter, maybe the person who learned it at age 11 could have learned it a couple years earlier.

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