[Techtalk] programming for beginners

[Akkana Peck]

Carla Schroder writes:
> But how does that help a beginner who needs training wheels?

Way back in the dark ages, Logo used to get bandied about as a good
starter language for kids. You use simple programming commands to
do graphics, so it's pretty visual. I googled -- and found out
"linux logo" isn't a good pair of search terms unless you want
images of Tux :-) -- but "linux logo programming" listed several
different implementations of Logo for Linux.

Just today someone was just telling me about Squeak, which is
supposed to be a more modern version of the same thing -- very
visual/graphical, object oriented, and simple. I have no direct
experience with it (at least not yet) but you could check it
out at http://squeakland.org/

Someone else posted in favor of Python along with a graphical
toolkit like wxWidgets, pygtk or tkinter -- while I'm a big fan
of Python and any of those toolkits can work for writing cross-
platform GUI scripts, it's not at all like the simple beginner
environment Carla was asking about. I do think python is a good
beginner language -- if you have fairly motivated students who
want to learn programming. If on the other hand you have a classroom
full of kids or computer newbies and you want to give them something
fun and visual that exposes them to programming concepts, python
plus a toolkit might be too much all at once.

And one more: quite a while ago, maybe 5 years ago or more, my
husband stumbled across something he thought was just the coolest:
"Visual Tcl". He'd had slight exposure to Visual Basic and had long
wished for something similarly easy in Linux, and he thought visual
tcl looked like exactly what he wanted. But then we both got
sidetracked and never did check it out. Looks like it's still
around: http://vtcl.sourceforge.net/

	...Akkana