Teaching kids/spouses to program

01/19/2006

It’s a sticky problem. Your child, spouse or other family member says “hey, I want to learn to program. Where do I start?” And sometimes it’s not even family, maybe there’s a DBA or sysadm at work who wants to learn how to program.

My cousin teaches in the Durham, NC school system and for a while he was teaching AP Computer Science. The introductory language of choice for these high-school kids? C++. I’m not sure, but I gotta think that’s against the Geneva convention.

I don’t have anything against C++ (much, I used it exclusively for almost a decade). But it makes a lousy teaching language. Newbies can blow off an entire leg instead of merely shooting their toes off, and never know why. Smalltalk, Logo, and now Ruby make much better languages for teaching.

Since we’ve had a bunch of people ask us for advice on teaching an introductory programming language, we decided to publish a book on it. Chris Pine’s new Learn To Program starts at the very beginning, teaching basic programming concepts.

One person wrote me and said they were going to read it as a bedtime story to their toddler. I think that may be pushing it a little, but ya gotta start somewhere :-)