Beginner programming

[angharad_gam]

I learned to program when was eight. I taught myself Basic using a manual that came with my uncle's Commodore 16 (so little RAM, so much fun). Looking back it was a pretty good language to learn to program with - simple WYSIWYG language in which it was fairly easy to get some interesting results with a few basic statements eg CIRCLE(x, y, z) to draw a circle of radius x at (y, z).

I'm thinking about this because Liam has seemed very interested in computers at the moment, or more specifically, his laser-like Aspie attention has fixated on Windows (the operating system). Whether he will be interested in more besides watching Windows instructional videos on You Tube, or borrowing Windows ME for Dummies from the library I don't know, but most of the programming I do is numeric and most of the programming software I have installed is oriented accordingly. The kind of thing you have to have a grasp of algebra to get the most out of.

What I am wondering, for the programmers out there, is there something available now that might be the equivalent of Basic for me *wince* number of years ago? Any advice on good programming educational software, or basic (pun intended) but effective languages?

I'm going to stop typing now, because either IE is acting up or we are shaped, and typing is a pain in the proverbial.

Comments

[reverancepavane.livejournal.com]

http://www.alice.org/

This was a project to teach OOP to K-12 kids in America. It's better than teaching coding as it teaches encapsulation and structure (which most modern programming languages use), and does it covertly by animating graphics. has accompanying teaching materials as well (always a bonus).

The problem these days tends to be two-fold. First of all, there are the OOPS design methodology that most programs operate under. Sceond, most programs operate in a windows environment (X, Apple or Microsoft) which means that they tend to be event-triggered loop (at least if you want to start doing anything interesting). So whereas I could teach people to program their own game very easily on an old Apple II, you now have to create the superstructure supporting the program before you actually get to the program doing something, even something as simple as "Hello World." And then, because of the OOPS abstraction, it tends to miss all the finicky (and important) details anyway. Alice handles both these tasks implicitly.

Macros

[dotcom1144.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

Macros might be an interesting place to start. I have explored them a bit in access, but no you can use them in other programs in office to do a bit of simple programming. Nothing as fancy as games but a good place to start. Either that or a book on visual basic.