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A comment on Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners.

Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by KingOfCoders on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:00AM (#23758264)
As someone who teached programming to many people on and off for the last 25 years, I still think nothing beats LOGO or Scratch. No tooling problems, no braces (in Scratch), no complicated syntax (what does "->" mean?). A programming language for beginners is NOT a dumbed down version of your functional/OO language of choice.

Turtle graphics helps people deconstruct problems into smaller parts - the essence of programming - and abstract over your solutions to solve more general problems. As a second step I use some IoT board with Scratch so people can turn on LEDs or react to sound which makes them motivated.

My first teaching 20y ago was with Java and it was a disaster. People struggled with the tool, syntax errors, semantics, braces and in the end could write some Java programs but did not understand what programming was about and could not solve their own problems.

+ Several submissions on one day.

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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by siraben on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:25AM (#23758441)
As a hackathon project I made a language[0] inspired by LOGO but using Unicode characters for the drawing primitives (presumably children could have some physics buttons or GUI to insert them). It also has support for loops and subroutines but otherwise it's a limited DSL like LOGO.

[0] https://github.com/siraben/vpl

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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by raghav_nautiyal on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:26AM (#23758450)
That sounds great! Will definitely give it a try!
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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by forgotpwd16 on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:35AM (#23758524)
Though most overlook it and/or consider it a toy language, Logo is a good educational language while remaining powerful. See for example [1]. It is also used beyond learning with some implementations specialized in agent-based modeling.

[1]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bh/logo-sample.html

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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by mimixco on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @09:07AM (#23758798)
LOGO is a Lisp, which is what makes it great. I owe my entire programming career to learning LOGO as a kid.
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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by raghav_nautiyal on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @08:02AM (#23758277)
Thanks! I'll try my best to improve.
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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by Jaxan on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @10:04AM (#23759385)
I learned with turtle graphics and similar things. For me the visual aspect was really important and fun!
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Re:Show HN: I built a programming language for beginners by KingOfCoders on Tuesday July 07, 2020 @10:28AM (#23759626)
The visual aspects is very important to beginners, they get immediate visual feedback of the effects of their program. Cause (code) and effects are very easy to see.
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