sysprv

Try Scratch! http://scratch.mit.edu/

Saw a great demonstration of this system at JAOO this year, by John Maloney of the MIT Media Lab :) [http://gotocon.com/aarhus-2010/speaker/John+Maloney]. Dan Ingalls and Rob Pike were in the audience.

The whole system really looks very nice and well thought out. Wish I had Scratch to learn with when I was young, instead of puttering around with Turbo C++ 3.0. Few "real", "man-size" programming languages/environments are so coherent.

If you want to be productive soon, try Scala. Martin Odersky (the creator) is a brilliant, level headed guy who is committed to keeping this language pragmatic. It's complex, but just like C++, you don't have to inhale the whole thing in one go to get things done :) So don't worry about all the people with blogs who denounce Scala for complexity.

Text editor preference seems to be as personal (and perhaps, perverse) as religion or sexual preference.

Last Monday I got the chance to ask (even though I'd read it before) James Gosling (the Father of Java, wrote first Emacs-y editor for Unix) if he still uses emacs, at least sometimes. The answer was: No. He uses NetBeans. Seems he writes no more lisp, having worked through his lifetime's quota of parentheses while working on his Ph.D [sic].

Met Douglas at JAOO (http://gotocon.com/) this year; got him to sign my copy of "JavaScript: The Good Parts" :)

Hear hear! This is the best approach, IMHO.