Hacker News Reader

Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

cant believe nobody has asked... what is the goal of easylang? why did you start working on it? why design choices are you most proud of?

View on HN

The aim is to offer beginners a simple and interesting entry into programming. IMO there is an unoccupied niche for this between Scratch and Python. In the days of home computer BASIC, it was easier to learn programming - you switched on the computer and with a few lines of BASIC code you could magically create a nice sine wave on the screen. Nowadays, beginners are often overwhelmed by all the complexity.

Are they? I learnt with Scratch from about four then moved to Python when I was about 9 (iirc), and I found the move pretty easy. There isn't much I would change about Python to make it better in that role, and there are plenty of online environments that do a great job of reducing the setup you need. The BASIC experience is now https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/editor-hello-wo... - are they really so different?

Plus, when you want to move onto slightly more complex projects you can just keep using Python and steadily adding to your knowledge.

E.g. I began with turtle, then something that showed who's in space using requests and an API, then a little chat app with sockets, then a full GUI chat app that pretended to be notepad so I could chat at school. Nowadays, I still sometimes write software in the same language that I first wrote print("Hello, world!") in.

Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that you're making it. I just think that Python is already a great language coming from Scratch.

@design choices: The graphic primitives built into the language - this is not useful for a general purpose language - but in beginner language this is an important motivating factor.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com