Kids Coding: Simple Java

Always feel when a software developer tries to teach coding to kids they seem to more wrapped up in the process and doing things the "correct" way (often over complicating things with typing, language nuance and command line rituals) than actually trying to teach what's really going on and more importantly empowering being able to step off and create something truly of their own which is the path to self sufficient learning.

The self initiated work I've seen kids create out of Scratch is seriously impressive and creative.

Definitely necessary. I remember those days, and the realization that I could run an existing program, or I could sit and make my own, and the latter was pretty appealing to me.

I picked up Human Resource Machine when it came to the Nintendo Switch a few months ago, and I loved it pretty immediately. I think it does a great job of abstracting out the fact that you're writing assembly, masked by their very dark sense of humor (Little Inferno, anyone?). Whenever one of my friends (other grown-ups, not even kids) say things similar to wishing they knew how to program, I suggest they pick the game up and give it a try. It's like jumping in the deep end, but does a good job of showing how to think like a computer would think.

Kotlin or not, I feel like Java is just the wrong choice. Even Kotlin, there's a lot of noise to start with. What's a function? What's an Array? What's a String? I have to either explain all those things, or handwave it as "magic; ignore it for right now" to students. I would find that incredibly frustrating as both a student, and a teacher.

I TAed an intro to CS class in Python for a number of years. I am rather ambivalent toward Python as a developer, but as a first language to be taught it worked pretty well. There are others, but having the minimum amount of noise for some basic coding examples I think is incredibly helpful (though I admit, I think I'm basically just saying "I think dynamically/optionally typed scripting languages > statically, explicitly typed compiled languages for this task").

I don't have my computer around, so replying with a throwawy account. Wall of text!

> While there are many oddities, I think Python lets you ignore them

Yes, thankfully. But libraries that will make programming interesting for children usually have a rather sophisticated design, including an object-oriented interface. Pygame is slightly too complex for my taste and installing it on Windows is a pain (not Python's fault). I've tried Pyglet on that platform, despite its hard API, and am I right now comparing two students, one on each framework (although the Pygame one uses pgrun).

Once they've used Python as a means to get a game displayed, it seems easier to teach Python's useful minutiae as it helps them code. Not enough experience to assert this with certainty though.

> Then, once you do want to introduce objects, I think Python's class system can be kept simple enough to begin with, and the parts that are inherently tricky (like self) have equivalently tricky parts in most other languages anyway.

Python's OOP really has more complexity than needed. Smalltalk does objects simpler. Alan Kay used it to teach programming to children (the seventies version, the public '82 version had more stuff, meant for adults.) Children can learn to program _starting_ with OOP, not structured programming, but Python (or Java, or...) will not help you there. It seems to expect its user to understand OOP in terms of structured programming, which a practicing programmer certainly can, but a child with limited abstract thought?

Interestingly, Alan Kay was a lisper, which brings me to...

> I don't know a lot about Smalltalk, but Scheme is an interesting idea for a first language.

Can't be sure without trying it, but probably. The scheme community has projects in teaching CS through game programming, with at least one scheme dialect for games and accompanying IDE where images are first-class objects, displayed in the code.

> I think a course teaching programming that goes into async IO, needs to discuss 'global' (something I've still used only twice in 5 years of Python), talks about decorators, etc, is doing something seriously wrong.

I can see how it came out that way, but I don't teach async IO to children; I try to teach some Python to colleagues from time to time.

As for 'global', was your programming activity the one of a beginner? When you have someone that successfully wrote a single script with variables and control structures, you will want them to start writing functions to complete the introduction to structured programming. You will want to make them reuse the existing state, and once they discover the limitations of it, slowly introduce local variables, scoping rules and so on. My students often have the right reasoning at this stage but forget 'global', _repeatedly_ (that's the important part -- hint of a bad UI), which means I have to explain scoping rules, which seem to them like unnecessary wanking at this point.

Guido's attention to newbie-friendliness is obvious, but Python is old and has accumulated cruft, and its developers have blind spots. Zed Shaw listed some of them. Also don't forget that a professional in IT has developed a thick skin when it comes to complexity, or less charitably, learned helplessness in the face of shitty design. Where we think a system's idiosyncrasies are mere details (or worse, the right way to do things), an innocent mind will refuse to engage.

I started with Pascal in school (6th grade I think). The book contained a few lines of code and said: This is the smallest program possible: it does nothing.

  program HelloWorld;
  begin
  end.

I was puzzled: why would you need to write something for it to do nothing? But it becomes clear very easily: all programs need to have a special structure to be correctly defined. This structure happens to be a block of code with a name. And that explanation was enough to satisfy me for the moment. I turned a few pages, and sure enough all examples had that structure with something else inside. I was already feeling good with myself for being able to recognize well structured programs.