Comments on: A letter to a 12-year-old

By: evilzug's Journal

evilzug's Journal — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 12:00:09 +0000

[...] Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old (Comment on this)10:27 am [...]

By: Best Dudes

Best Dudes — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 17:32:11 +0000

[...] Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old LinkLeave a comment [...]

By: Announcements from Darth Sidhe's Sithly allies

Announcements from Darth Sidhe's Sithly allies — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 00:58:32 +0000

[...] Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old [...]

By: Geoffrey's Friends

Geoffrey's Friends — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:36:42 +0000

[...] Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old (Comment on this) evilzug [...]

By: » Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old - ScatteredGenius.com

» Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old - ScatteredGenius.com — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:35:01 +0000

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By: Which Game Development Language to Learn? « Gamer Brasilis

Which Game Development Language to Learn? « Gamer Brasilis — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 18:16:32 +0000

[...] subject had reminded of a post on Raph Koester’s blog where he is asked about which would be a good programming language to learn. Flash showed up a good [...]

By: Pritchard

Pritchard — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 10:13:59 +0000

Hah. BlitzBasic? I guess I must be strange for simply enjoying BASIC syntax and seeing it as a language for general use. I use FreeBASIC at the moment for my BASIC coding. I was in fact, programming a game in BASIC and was getting prototypes done fairly quickly until I ran into problems due to lack of inheritance and the likes.

Anyways, your post made me realize that BASIC syntax isn’t enough. Even though I’m comfortable in FreeBASIC, and it’s what got me into coding other languages, to really appeal to beginners, the community should probably consider putting together a Beginner’s Suite of some sort.

Of course, now with pre-existing frameworks becoming so popular, I might as well just recommend them Java instead. Netbeans is a great IDE. Java’s framework is excellent. The naming conventions are great for beginners. The official sun tutorials are wonderful, too… Hrm.

By: Tess

Tess — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:10:39 +0000

BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?

Oh, geeze, I wish I could answer this question. There’s no equivalent to the ubiquitous command-line BASIC parser, anymore.

I’d say that for today’s kids, quick gratification is important. There are a lot of folks out there working on kid-languages, with fancy multimedia crap and whatnot. I’m not sure what I think about those. (I wasn’t a big fan of LOGO, as a kid, to be honest.) I’d almost say that a kid should, instead, pick a favorite moddable game, and write scripts for that. It provides fast, tangible feedback, with very satisfying results.

By: Raph Koster explains it all — To the blogmobile!

Raph Koster explains it all — To the blogmobile! — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 23:15:27 +0000

[...] To a 12-year old. Really good. [...]

By: Michelle D'israeli

Michelle D'israeli — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:07:23 +0000

I’m going to be daring and say a Pascal variant, especially something like Delphi.

For all its evil, an object orientated pascal style language is a wonderful first programming language. Most of them allow access to pointers, allowing you to practice with lower-level systems (but then, I am a computer systems engineer by training, so I view understanding the internals as vital). Delphi made it easy to get working GUIs fast, and taught some good practices.

The problem with anything that doesn’t give you help with a GUI is that it either limits you to minimal console IO, or extremely complex systems (there’s a reason I’ve written a personal include file for IO in C).

I suppose however, in this day and age of advanced compilers, the better question is not ‘which langauge’, but which compiler and IDE. A good compiler for learning will give highly meaningful error messages that make immediate sense and are not followed with more frightening run-on errors.