Programming for kids

“Some of us are old – very, very old. Some of us remember
teaching kids to program in a language called Logo which was, in
its simplest form, a language used to control the movements of a
“turtle” (actually a small triangular icon) on the computer screen.
As the kids learned more of the language and grasped the building
blocks of programming such as looping, they could begin to create
prettier and prettier graphics. Eventually, of course, real life
came calling, and beat them up for being such nerds. Such is the
hard life of a budding computer programmer.

“Lest I get a ton of angry emails, let me declare right now
that, yes indeed, I do know that Logo was capable of far more than
prancing turtles. As the Wikipedia article on the subject says,
some people considered Logo to be Lisp without the irritating
parentheses. But at that time, drawing cool graphics on the screen
was as far as most people ever got with it. Anyway, Logo is now
long gone as far as most people are concerned, and since the advent
of the web, the Wii, the iPhone and all the other wonders of the
modern world, no-one has the time to learn a programming language
when all they’re going to get out of it at the end is a few
primitive patterns. If you’re going to teach kids to program
nowadays you’ve got to find something that will allow them to build
real-looking applications as fast as possible.”

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