[arkades]

The language for iPhone is Objective C. This is a pretty popular tutorial package for it: http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-apprentice

I'm only a fledgeling programmer myself, so my comment should be taken with a grain of salt, but I suspect ObjC might be a bit much to start with for a 12 year old. I tried and failed to take up programming a few times before I finally tried python and it stuck. Then again, that's just me.

[sprintf]

Right, I think ObjC is too much for a 12 year old with no programming experience. (Frankly, IMO, anything with manual memory management is probably too much.) So I'm curious if HN'ers suggest other ways to get something going without writing it in ObjC.