[sethammons]

Firstly, I think the project looks beautiful.

Personally, I just can't stand Ruby, so my opinion will not be balanced. I think the optional parenthesis will be terrible for a new programmer. I think the optional return statement will cause confusion in some cases. The absolute worst is the once or twice I've pasted code into the editor, and when run, I get a cryptic error. Using a hex editor, I discovered that some unicode whitespace got in there and was interpreted as a method or variable. wtf.

For my daughter, we started with Python (and bpython from the command line for explorability). She got caught up on classes, but I think that is natural. She is starting to look at javascript now and we will see how that goes. I think both of these are interesting first languages to learn (not without their warts for sure!). For my youngest, we started looking at Scratch from MIT.