[II2II]

I would like to think that the industry learned the error of its ways.

The 1980s and 1990s were prime times for kids getting into programming. Early personal computers came with BASIC. Early HTML and JavaScript were simple enough for a child to get into. That seemed to fall apart in the 2000s when programming languages did not come standard with personal computers and the growing complexity of web development made it increasingly difficult to create anything exciting by the standards of the day. Those were also the times when programming books geared towards kids seemed to disappear.

Of course many of the modern efforts are much more artificial since they rely upon programming languages geared towards kids. Yet that is the price of complexity. Regardless of what the article's author argues, modern devices are much more complex under the hood. Much of that complexity bleeds into the tools that would appeal to the inner nerd. Languages geared towards kids both reduce that complexity and add to the excitement of creating more sophisticated programs. Children who learn them will have the basics to leap into "real" programming languages.

The other thing that we have witnessed over the past few years is a renewed interest in books geared towards children of most ages. For a while the best that I saw were titles geared towards teens and determined tweens. Now it is possible to find Python (and Ruby) books that mirror some of the BASIC books that were written for children in the early 1980s.

Things are getting better, even if walled gardens are leading some people to claim otherwise.

[tarsinge]

For me I found it way harder to get into programing in the 90's, as a kid in this decade I really wanted to make my own games and software but being on a Mac I couldn't find how to cross the gap, you didn't have BASIC like before with the Apple II or MSDOS, it was full-featured GUI with expensive compilers or nothing. Now any kid can open the dev console in a browser and write javascript, or even create basic HTML files. Maybe we should encourage more quick and dirty approach and avoid recommending frameworks and complex build processes for hobbyist projects.

[icebraining]

What about HyperCard?