On 4 Jan 2005 at 11:47, Dave Dyer wrote:

... That's bad, but the worst is that the only environment that supports javascript, your browser, is an absolute mess.

This isn't correct: JavaScript runs as a stadalone "Windows Scripting Host" language and when run from Windows [as opposed to run from your browser] has an object model that includes most of the system stuff [so you can browse the filesystem, run programs, etc]

The choice of curriculum is just as important as the choice of language. I would stay away from anything involving graphics, threads, processes, and I/O until the student has definitely got the concepts.

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by 'graphics' but my memory, from MANY years ago, is that graphics is one of the BEST things to start new- programmers doing. It is fun, and you get immediate, clear feedback [try having fun or understanding if your code is correct writing a program to find primes or the digits of pi..:o)]. /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--

On 4 Jan 2005 at 17:41, The Purple Streak, Hilarie Or wrote:

Bernie Cosell writes:

[try having fun or understanding if your code is correct writing a program to find primes or the digits of pi..:o)].

You seem to have defined fun for most people on the list. (No :-) at all).

Nope, I was referring to the original subject, a "bright 13-year-old". I think that folks like Seymore Papert and Wally Feurzig spent a fair bit of time pondering this problem and I'm pretty sure that their consensus is that drawing neat pictures [and making the turtle scoot around the furniture] is more "fun" [sic..:o)] than noticing that the 127,765th digit of 'e' is 7. [and when the turtle hits the wall or the like, it is more clear that there is a problem and what it might be, than if you've done some complicated sort algorthm and on the 125th test list it screwed up [because you got one of the boundary conditions wrong and that was the first data set with the particular 'situation']] Obviously, Y (and the 13-year-old's) MMV... /Bernie\ -- Bernie Cosell Fantasy Farm Fibers mailto:bernie@fantasyfarm.com Pearisburg, VA --> Too many people, too few sheep <--

Quoting Marc LeBrun <mlb@fxpt.com>:

Who do you think writes viruses? (Ender's Game, anyone?<;-)

Well, OSC has just barely released the first three chapters of the book in which they are probably going to find out who wrote (created ?) the descolada virus. In the meantime, Jane was an artificial intelligence that got out of hand, but I dont think it was ever made clear who the author was; anyway not the kids. However: they did hack the computer net soon after their first arrival, but that was more or less expected of them. If hacking HTML is so easy, why can't I do it? Does anyone remember, or have they used KIM-1? Those were really great for getting a feel for hardware and machine language, although their associated memory didn't allow for very complicated programs. That and the somewhat lousy order code of the 6502 vs 8080, for example. ------------------------------------------------- www.correo.unam.mx UNAMonos Comunicándonos

Marc LeBrun wrote:

For example, my son quite reasonably had zero interest in the baroqueries of HTML until I showed him how he could edit the sources of actual pages he browsed to get silly variants. Soon he wanted to craft his own "cool" home page.

I learned programming on a Commodore Vic 20; I was eight or ten. There were a bunch of BASIC games on tapes we'd load and run. My dad must have shown me the LIST command; when the maze for Pac-Man scrolled by, editing it was the most natural thing in the world. The ghosts wandered up and got caught in the score. On Donkey Kong, I moved the princess off the edge of the platform (unfinished building? what was that thing?) so we had to fling ourselves off the edge and tumble flailing into the princess. Scott Adams (not Dilbert) wrote a bunch of text advenure games. Our family loved solving the puzzles together. When I tried writing one, I found it awkward to recode the command interpreter for each room. GOSUB was a blessed revelation. Eventually my adventure needed the 20k expander card to fit in memory. I learned binary by hand-coding the pixels of the monochrome graphics. When that got tiresome, I figured out how to scrape the screen and convert an 8x8 array of characters into a sprite. I copied & tweaked the fractal programs from Scientific American's Computer Recreations columns. This led into a lot more maths: what the heck does z^z mean when z is complex? My teacher didn't know, but she gave me an article on exp(i theta) that answered the question and opened up a lot more neat stuff. Most languages have shortcomings, but it won't stop anyone if they're having fun. -- Mike Stay staym@clear.net.nz http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~msta039

On 1/4/05 8:18 PM, "Bernie Cosell" <bernie@fantasyfarm.com> wrote:

On 4 Jan 2005 at 17:41, The Purple Streak, Hilarie Or wrote:

Nope, I was referring to the original subject, a "bright 13-year-old". I think that folks like Seymore Papert and Wally Feurzig spent a fair bit of time pondering this problem and I'm pretty sure that their consensus is that drawing neat pictures [and making the turtle scoot around the furniture] is more "fun" [sic..:o)] than noticing that the 127,765th digit of 'e' is 7. [and when the turtle hits the wall or the like, it is more clear that there is a problem and what it might be, than if you've done some complicated sort algorthm and on the 125th test list it screwed up [because you got one of the boundary conditions wrong and that was the first data set with the particular 'situation']]

Seymour Papert was involved with Lego in the initial idea behind their MindStorms product, which I recommended earlier in this thread as a good way for a bright 13-year-old to learn programming: http://www.lego.com/eng/info/default.asp?page=timeline2 http://mindstorms.lego.com/eng/default.asp