Ruby.
Give the Why's Poignant Guide and you can't go wrong. Plus he'll love the cartoons, even if he doesn't get the strangely subtle adult humor.
Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
21–30 of 119 posts
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#22As a teenager, I tried various "real" coding languages - C++, Java, VB (ugh) - but I was never able to get engaged in them. All I wanted to do was build something cool quickly, and none of these languages allowed that without a significant time investment. Then, I tried out PHP. Within a few days, I was building random tools left and right, and having a great time doing it. So, to get him interested, I recommend you…
This is good advice.
I personally thought VB6 did a good job of letting you build something quickly in its day, in spite of its other faults.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#23Call me old school, but I would start off with Basic. If he was younger I would recommend Logo. Once he's hooked I would get him into C or pascal. I can't recommend enough getting him a "Basic Stamp" kit. Seeing how software can control hardware is magical. Then work him up into "Arduino" world in C.
This is not a bad idea. Interfacing with hardware can be really fun, but basic enough that they can be creative.
"Hey, see if you can make those 8 LEDs do like the KITT car!"
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#24As a teenager, I tried various "real" coding languages - C++, Java, VB (ugh) - but I was never able to get engaged in them. All I wanted to do was build something cool quickly, and none of these languages allowed that without a significant time investment. Then, I tried out PHP. Within a few days, I was building random tools left and right, and having a great time doing it. So, to get him interested, I recommend you…
Same here, I started with QBasic and VB but never really accomplished anything in them. PHP is when I really started to "do stuff."
These days though, I would recommend teaching him Python or Ruby.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#25Scratch (http://scratch.mit.edu/) is a good way to learn the basics of putting programs together. It's done visually and it may feel like just a toy, but you can do some pretty cool things, it has a very shallow learning curve, and it can intuitively guide you to learning some important concepts which then have applicability to traditional programming.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#26Logo isn't too bad. It's open source, scheme derived, and very easy to make games (beginners like immediate feedback). http://education.mit.edu/starlogo/
At 13, he may be too old for it, but Logo was one of my first languages back in elementary school, and I remember being very excited that I could write my own galaxian clone in just a day or so.
Otherwise, I would stay away from JavaScript and Ruby (I like them, but they are hard for beginners) and stick with Python.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#27As a teenager, I tried various "real" coding languages - C++, Java, VB (ugh) - but I was never able to get engaged in them. All I wanted to do was build something cool quickly, and none of these languages allowed that without a significant time investment. Then, I tried out PHP. Within a few days, I was building random tools left and right, and having a great time doing it. So, to get him interested, I recommend you…
Second on the idea that it should be quick and easy to make useful stuff, but I have to disagree on PHP. Most of the example code out there is terrible, out of date or both. It's very easy to make a mess in PHP.
Python seems to be the teaching language of choice these days, and it lets you do useful stuff without getting in the way. It's certainly not the only language to learn, but I'm inclined to say it should be the first.
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#28I recommend NetLogo. It is simple to learn, LISP-inspired, and makes it trivially easy to do all sorts of graphical work. It runs on the JVM.
(I took a class in which we used NetLogo to run agent-based economics simulations. Lots of fun, although the LISPer in you will start to hate it after a while.)
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#29Whatever you teach him, teach him something that you love. You will infect him with your enthusiasm and that matters an order of magnitude more than which language.
Heck, there are plenty of situations where exactly this happened, and the programming language was COBOL or Assembly!
Re: Ask HN: What programming language should I teach my little brother?
#30ActionScript was the first programming language I learned. I found some tutorials on how to make games and little by little learned by changing the source code. Being able to create graphics was very rewarding and the popularity of flash made it easy to show my friends what I had done. The feedback loop was very important in keeping me interested in programming.
Project sprouts (http://www.projectsprouts.com) makes it easy to get started in ActionScript and is also a good introduction to writing support scripts in Ruby.