[slifin]

Something I'm noticing more and more is that programming is for the most part is not fun

Fun things are visual, immediate full of feedback and introspection, a sensible curve of difficulty and reward for effort

A raspberry pi doesn't spark joy, in fact most computers don't

I'm not exactly sure how we could do better but Bret Victor's talk inventing on principle and his other talks are always an inspiration

[yarcob]

Thonny and the turtle package are pretty neat. Not quite as direct as Bret Victors examples, but you have immediate feedback and a debugger.

The Python arcade package is also absolutely fun. We spent a day programming a Snake-clone, and some things like the predefined color names are just hilarious. (But I realised that building a game with a run loop is probably too hard for beginners)

My main problem is the difficulty part you mention: There's a pretty big step before you can do rewarding things like moving the player with keyboard control in a fun way.

[slifin]

Along these lines I'm tempted to try out game maker studio 2 at some point, I think in code we rely way too much on text

I'd love lots of custom project specific UI in my ide showing all kinds of things to help me out with my larger projects