[anfelor]

The best attempt at creating a learnable programming language I've seen is this design document by Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming

It is now ten years old but I don't know if it has even been put into practice? To be fair, it would be a lot of work to include all the IDE features and Easylang comes reasonably close to it already. However, if I could recommend one paragraph it is the one on "Recomposition", which is an extremely clear explanation of why functional programming matters for learnable programming.

[empressplay]

Every so often I re-read Bret's post to see what I can add to our learning environment. We use CodeMirror as our editor so we have pop-over help, color syntax highlighting and an optional autocomplete (optional because feedback from teachers was that it was too distracting).

We have a 'fluid' turtle that allows for the learner to follow execution to a point, although we do need to add in the ability to see which line of code is being executed at any given time, and the ability to control the execution speed better, maybe with a slider.

We're currently implementing (based on teacher feedback) a series of graduated environments where each 'level' unlocks more IDE features and primitives. For example, this is 'artSpace', a 2D environment (we also have a 3D environment):

https://turtlespaces.org/weblogo/?profile=artspace (warning, 40mb load)