[wellylug] Beginner programming languages and environments for linux

[Brent Wood]

 Lyndsay Mountfort wrote:
 > My 8-year-old daughter is asking for an introduction to programming. I'm
 > interested in suggestions for what language and environment people would
 > suggest, for a simple text-based quiz programme, that is easily
 > available for my linux laptop. Is there a good linux basic interpreter
 > that someone has experience of?
 

I'd look at a scripting language. For simple procedural stuff, a shell script
such as bash is very easy, and you can avoid some of the more arcane stuff.

If you wanna go object oriented, see perl or python, plenty of adherents for
both no doubt.

LOGO (turtle) was devised as a kid's programming language from the start, there
is prob something available there as well.

Summat else some kids can pick up pretty quickly is HTML & php, for a web based
approach. A simple screen with data entry into local variables is pretty
simple.


I guess the main question is are you gonna be the mentor & if so, what are you
comfortable teaching? 


Brent