[joelanders]

When we talk about making programming accessible to kids (or anyone new to it), I think of how selling and distributing software is different now than it used to be. Webapps and app stores make it easy to reach thousands or millions of customers, but what's the modern equivalent of a kid writing something in BASIC (or VB) and selling a few copies to friends, parents, local businesses, etc.?

Some kind of Ruby/Tk/SQLite bundle that produced a universal executable (say, mac, win, lin) would be cool, I think.

[heleph]

I cut my teeth writing websites using PHP and MySQL, mostly around a computer game I used to play. I got a few thousand hits in the first year and plenty of nice email so I kept going with it and eventually studied software development at uni and have spent the last 15 years working as a developer.

I actually knew a heap of kids around my age (I started at around 15) who I met through my website who did the same thing and many of them also became developers or designers too.

I don't know if the web is still as accessible as it was back then when you could get free hosting somewhere like Geocities if you were just starting out, but I think HTML and javascript are a really nice starting point because it's fairly easy to cobble together something that works and you can get a fairly long way just by trying to make whatever you built just that little bit better. The web is also a good place to learn about the web, particularly since in those days it was easy to view source on anything I saw that I didn't know how to do myself.