teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

On 1/3/12 12:06 AM, "Richard" <legalize at xmission.com> wrote: ISTR another 'stupid programming language tricks' page that opined there are almost always several ways to solve any given problem - and you'll find ALL of them in C++! I toyed with Lisp a number of years ago but, at the time, couldn't think of anything I wanted to do with it. Recently (the past year or two) I decided it was time to tackle it again. This time it made sense, I think in part because I was exposed to functional programming, which broke the hold of C/C++ on my thinking. (Don't underestimate how solidly one can become 'stuck' in a particular paradigm.) I find myself drawn to the Scheme dialect: IMHO (pull the pin and throw) 'Common Lisp' is bloated and bogged down with syntactic sugar-treats for those who fear recursion. Not only do I like Scheme/Lisp, but I don?t think it's that hard to teach it to beginners. For instance, recursion: to do something to a group of things, take one thing and apply the action, then do the same thing to the rest of the group until you run out of things. Easy! If you need to accumulate a solution from the multiple operations, just combine the return value of the first action with the return value of the action on the remainder. Turtles all the way down?. Looping constructs are syntactic wrapping for this idea. Further, I agree that they would begin their journey into computational thinking with a solid foundation on which to build an understanding of whatever other languages they might find that map well between a particular problem domain and the computing environment (which is one legitimate reason we have so many programming languages!). And as some have touched on within this thread, the greater good is to create computational literacy, not to just teach people how to write programs. -- Ian