Codeworld: An open-source educational programming environment using Haskell

Go with Python instead of Haskell, to get started in programming. It does follow the mantra "do what I mean not what I say" to some extent.

Learning Haskell would be more fun once you are good at basics.

Not sure why kp25 was downvoted. I've been working with a 12-year old for the last couple of months to teach him programming and some web development.

> a young child doesn't want to write more than ONE line of code without a meaningful result.

This is something that I completely agree with and found to be true in my experience. To this end, I've found IPython to be an excellent way of giving feedback while coding. The notebooks have a nice UI, documentation is readily available and its much easier to edit mistakes by simply editing the cell.

I'd recommend you give IPython a shot.

Scratch is rewarding... And since you dont have to type The commands... There cant be typing mistakes.

Hey! I built CodeWorld. Thanks for the kind words!

Yeah, the examples are a mess right now. Let me point you to a couple things: first, there's a partially complete tutorial (click the Help button) with some simple examples. Second, (and this is very early on, so please be forgiving!) there's a draft of a textbook at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NbMtySIDNK40Bk4ImrUAE95S... So yeah, we're working very hard on fixing the documentation issues. Patience!

I don't have such a good answer about syntax. The syntax is about as good as I can make it. There is autocomplete (Ctrl-Space) for built-in function names, and brace highlighting, and I'd love to work on more features to make the programming more interactive with immediate feedback. I also wrote a simplified version of Haskell's standard library and wrote a simple post-processor to reword the more confusing error messages, in an attempt to make it easier to find and fix problems that do occur. If you have ideas or find particularly bad examples, please add a quick example at https://github.com/google/codeworld/issues/new

If this doesn't work, and you look for alternatives to teach programming to your daughter, you might consider Scratch or (if you're still into doing it with functional programming) bootstrapworld.org.

Thanks for looking!

Yes and no... not to make it easier, per se, but to make it more like math. I built CodeWorld, not to teach Haskell, but to teach middle school math! So the main motivation was to make it easier for students to see the connection between the functions they write here, and the f(x,y) that they see in algebra.

That said, uncurrying functions also has a huge benefit when it comes to understanding error messages in Haskell. I love currying in Haskell, and it's very powerful... but it's one of the features that sometimes leads to obscure or misleading errors -- especially when you leave out type signatures... which I do for the first month or two.