KidsProgrammingLanguage

My twelve year old wants to program games on his computer! The fad will probably last a week, but I thought I better help launch him just the same. First requirement: choose a suitable language. I learned Basic like my contemporaries at a time when getting anything at all to appear on a computer screen was cool, but it’s so passé now with the kind of computer applications kids are used to. Dr. Scheme is so elegant syntactically but not very cool either. After exploring tonight, I’ve come up with this interesting blog discussion on a whole raft of languages and this has led me to investigate KPL (KidsProgrammingLanguage) and its successor Phrogram which look like simple versions of sophisticated object oriented languages and which use nice GUIs. I’ll try it and report back here.