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Comment by jeron | Hacker News Reader

+1 to this. If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries. If you want something that would get kids that wanted to get into programming to create custom Fortnite modes, you want something that looks closer to Scratch or Python. I want to say Roblox has made programming quite accessible to children iirc

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Why does it have to be either extreme? It certainly looks much easier than Agda or Coq. As someone without a CS degree, I applaud them for not racing to the bottom and creating an ad-hoc dynamically-typed soup, which still needs an instruction manual, if only to figure out how the equality operator works.

Programming has been going for a while, and there's a very wide variety of programming languages. I think one of the reason people have gone for things like Logo, Python, Lua when teaching kids is that there's a wide range of capabilities so you need to make sure they all can learn the basics without leaving others behind. If you try to teach anything too complicated the geek kids that are into computers and videogames will love it, but a third of the kids will just hate it. Maybe since Verse is a language expressly for Fornite, kids will self-select and it won't be as much of an issue, but if the question is whether it's a good language for kids to learn, it doesn't look very promising at first glance.

Having worked with a team building new programming languages and consisting of Haskell creators, I can confirm this was a near-fatal issue in those projects too.

> If anything, you have a language that looks like it was made by luminaries, for luminaries.

Well, the opposite of that approach gives you Go.

Opposite in the sense that golang was created by luminaries for new grads

Roblox uses Lua, right?

I think Redstone in Minecraft are good examples of introduction to programming via visual programming languages. Something you can really feel and play around with. I'm not sure how Verse or Lua are integrated into their respective games but it's really hard to imagine kids being able to get into these languages without something that gives immediate visual feedback

Minecraft redstone is a terrible example. The idea of it is great, the implementation, not so much. It's super non obvious for a lot of thing, have got behaviour that changes based on location in the world, etc... It' not uncommon for people to dive into the code to figure out how redstone works or watching tutorials from people who have done so.

The only people who can use redstone are those who just memorize the standard gates and treat them as black boxes. That's no longer redstone then, that's just normal boolean logic stuff.

Maybe I’m revealing my youth here, but I played Roblox waaaay back as a middle-schooler around 2009/2010 or so (it existed in 2006!), and it was my first introduction to programming. The Roblox editor was _rough_, but Lua probably got me interested in the field of software in the first place.

Anecdotal, yes, but based on how popular Roblox has become, I would guess that its a fine enough intro language for even the next generation of software engineers

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