

Interview with Peteris Krumins - pkrumins
http://lambdaphant.com/blog/interview-with-peteris-krumins

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djhworld
I started out in VB too, when I was 12-13 years old.

While I wouldn't touch the language with a 10ft barge pole today, I do credit
it for kicking off my interest in programming and ultimately my career. I
agree with Peteris that kids do like the instant results you get with a very
RAD like environment such as VB.

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Smerity
I personally think that Python fills the goal of instant validation quite well
for children. There's an interactive interpreter and very little setup for
your first program (as opposed to Java's public static void main(String[]
args) before even reaching "Hello World").

I help run a summer school[1] for high school students (many of whom have
never programmed) and within a few days they can start putting together fairly
complicated programs. One for example created an anagram solver for an online
game literally within a day of learning what a program was and two or three
days later their team had created a simple web crawler as the basis of their
from-scratch search engine.

I think as long as they see a way to solve their own problems you'll hold
attention long enough to get them self sufficient.

[1] National Computer Science School - www.ncss.edu.au

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djhworld
Yeah, to clarify my original comment, back then I found VB very rewarding to
work with as a child because you got instant results with buttons to press,
textboxes to type in and so on.

I think nowadays it would be counter productive to teach children VB, the
toolkits and languages out there today are a lot more robust an accessible in
comparison to what it was like when I was learning to program

