[vox] ISO: Good programming language to teach an 8yr old

[Norm Matloff]

On Fri, Mar 19, 2004 at 11:33:58AM -0800, dylan wrote:

> based on what i have seen form python, it seems like a very promising
> language to learn... that might be your best bet.. i know that i want to
> learn it someday!!

I'm really big on Python, definitely my favorite language.  It's very
clean and elegant, and just as powerful as Perl without Perl's ugliness.

If you like object-oriented programming (I'm lukewarm on it), Python's
O-O features are far cleaner than Perl's, as Python was designed to be
O-O from the ground up.  On the other hand, it can be used as a straight
procedural language.

In terms of teaching kids, I've never done this, but I would suggest
that Python would work very well.  One thing in particular which would
recommend it in that context is that Python can also be run in
interactive mode.

I've got an introduction (presumes experience in C) at

   http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/~matloff/python.html 

Norm