[pgtan]

I try to introduce my boy (12) in programming trough Scratch but still no big success. However, we solved recently two math homework exercises with Prolog (logic) and MetaPost (geometry) which caused some effect, so I'm thinking to deepen in that languages or may be switch to Logo as intermediate lisp like solution.

[threatofrain]

I know a young child who is going through Scratch, but also no big success, but then the child was introduced to Racket and is now using it as a math companion tool, such as for visualizations and calculations.

The child was encouraged to build general solutions to homework, and suddenly a lot of schoolwork with tedious arithmetic seems boring to the child.

[flavio81]

That is the best way to introduce computers to a kid: "let it do the hard work for you".

Logo used to be very popular for kids here in the '80s. I learnt Logo when i was 7, then i "progressed" over the years to Basic, C, Pascal, C++, Java, C#, Python and now, after about 28 years, Lisp. And now I realize Logo is close to Lisp in many ways and a far more powerful language than some of the ones I "progressed" to.

[kbp]

It's always been interesting to me how Logo, a Lisp dialect, was so successful as a language for teaching children to program, but so many people still go around with the idea that Lisp is really hard to wrap your head around.

[kazinator]

> People still go around with the idea that Lisp is really hard to wrap your head around.

Usually, the people who genuinely had a "hard to wrap head around experience" weren't actually using Lisp but a different language called Scheme which is hard to do for anything practical, if you stick just to the standard-defined dialect.

Chances are that when they used Scheme, it was a school setting, and they were complete or almost complete programming newbies, and were asked to do everything with recursion, and also given demanding homework, like interpreting Scheme in Scheme and whatnot.

[flavio81]

>that Lisp is really hard to wrap your head around.

It deserves a blog post, but I'd say Lisp (at least Lisp in its mainstream Common Lisp incarnation) is easy to learn but extremely hard to master, since it allows many possibilities and paradigms, and because of the power of meta programming. So to master it, you would be familiarized with all the paradigms and you would know how to leverage meta programming, etc. Also, since it allows improving performance by going to low-level details (like observing the assembly output of your function), you would better know a bit of assembly/machine language if you want to be able to improve the performance of Lisp to approach (or equal) C code. So previous experience with low-level programming, at least with C, would be a good prerequisite.

But yes, using it for simple stuff is easy, and in fact, while I consider Python a great "first language to learn", sometimes I feel that Lisp isn't much difficult than Python, for the same tasks. Python is much easier to master, but then it is much more limited.

[pgtan]

Yes, my kid was impressed about solving the problem just by describing it.

[flavio81]

Exactly in the same way my mind was blown the first time I tried Prolog!