Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Teaching Programming to an 11-year-old
Author: David Rothgery Posted: 5/26/2000; 6:18:11 PM Topic: Teaching Programming to an 11-year-old Msg #: 17436 (In response to 17427) Prev/Next: 17435 / 17437
Hmm.I know when I picked up programming (I was a bit younger than your daughter), I wanted to build 'real' applications -- things that were like the commercial software I used. What I could do with BASIC on my Color Computer didn't really get there, but it was close enough, and software I used still had command-line interfaces.
But I also remember losing interest in programming in high school, as real programs became GUI-based Windows programs, and I didn't have the tools to build them. I ended up studying CS in college, but it wasn't until I got ahold of Visual Basic in an HCI class that I had something that I could quickly and easily build a GUI-based Windows application with.
So if your daughter has the practical bent that I did, introducing her to programming in VB might not be as difficult as you think. On the other hand, a 'real' application today might well be a web-based application, in which case you might want to introduce her to programming with JavaScript, ASP and VBScript, Perl, PHP, Python, or even UserTalk.
As for me, I work in Visual Basic and occasionally Perl these days, like both of them, warts and all, and am praying that VB7 (and the rest of Visual Studio 7) will be as good as it looks (and that ActiveState's VisualPerl really will be seemless plug-in to Visual Studio).
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