Getting started in programming

O'Reilly net recently published an interesting thread titled Which Programming Language? discussing the question of a 12 year old boy who wanted to get into programming.

There was various discusison of looking at the tasks he was interested - maybe flash for games etc. Then someone suggested Cocoa and Objective-C.. crikey! Why not just suggest he starts tuning queries for the Oracle SQL query planner!!

Programming is such a big deal these days, how WOULD you get started as a 12 year old who thinks he would like to do it as a hobby? I'm sure I'm not alone among you readers in having started into programming as a hobby at that sort of age.

Finally in the thread, a wise man tells how he started his son programming on a Commodore-64 emulator - figuring that it worked for him when he got started.

That's genius! When you learn to fly for example, you start in something like a Cessna or a Piper—planes that are barely different from the very first single-wing planes—and learn the basic principals of winged flight. Just because you can get faster, better (and safer) jet planes doesn't mean that's what you should learn in.

So a simulator it is. I would personally start my son on an Apple //e emulator, but whatever.

So then what do you do once you're done with 10 Print "Hello"; 20 GOTO 10 ? Buy him a Dr Dobbs Journal and tell him to check out the nifty design patterns? I hope I still have some of my Nibble magazines somehwere—I would like to give my son (when I have one)a two page basic listing of a simple arcade game to type in—he'll learn to track down typos in his code, and can learn about simple data structures, memory access etc.

It's a real need—maybe Apple could make a market out of marketing an Apple //e emultor and beginmer educational material.