Slashdot Mirror

Ruby or Python.

"if going down the Ruby route, then the online runner may be of help: http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0"

Why in the world was this modded down?

I'll oppose that. Instead start right here http://tryruby.org/levels/1/challenges/0, and or here http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/quickstart/ and then move onto here http://www.rubycentral.com/pickaxe/ and here http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book.

Ruby has to be the best learning program, from the interactive Ruby shell, with immediate execution of lines of code to very compact and easy to read code.

One click in a browser and he can be coding in Ruby in seconds.

If he lives near Los Angeles, UCode (www.ucode.com) teaches kids how to program through worksheets and exercises. Sounds ideally suited for him. The Ruby programming language is used. Ruby is an excellent choice for an 11 year old, easy to get started and serious enough to do amazing production applications (particularly for the web). There are some great tutorials online including tools to try ruby code (tryruby.org and 19pad.charlie.bz). Code School has a free short course using tryruby: http://www.codeschool.com/courses/try-ruby.

Except for writing programs, I would have to say that just about all those tasks are now done solely in the web browser for a large majority of people, and the vast majority of people will never write a program.

And for those that want to write a program anyway, at least at the level of introductory learning, there's

http://tryruby.org/

http://tryhaskell.org/

and probably many more....

Babies can learn and grow and become something more than they are.

What can this become? It's born a freak of nature, a frankenbaby, and really ought to be put out of its misery. I put it much more in the category of stuff like hanoimania than stuff like WebGL and Native Client -- the latter are kind of security and stability hazards now, need better user controls to avoid random websites burning even more battery life than Flash, and don't have any applications proving themselves, but could be really fucking cool later on, whereas hanoimania is really cool, but was never meant to be taken seriously.

So, seriously, why would you ever want this? Let's run through those again...

DOS games? I suppose it could work, but it's never going to be as efficient as a native DOSbox. But I guess that could be cool, and maybe even useful, if there's some old DOS app that you absolutely, positively cannot get running any other way.

Crypto libraries? There are tons of libraries for JavaScript, even crypto libraries. And even if this was the way to do it, surely there are better choices than x86 as an instruction set for something you know is going to be pure emulation -- and surely there are better APIs than running the entire thing in a VM.

Training? I don't really see it. I mean, yes, Try Ruby is awesome, and having something similar for Linux and the shell would be similarly awesome. But Try Ruby lasts about 15 minutes before it's really time to move on, there's nothing more you can do here, go download the actual software. Even Heroku seems to be deprecating their web-only approach in favor of downloadable commandline utils.

And that's if it was a fully-functional VM-in-a-browser, with decent enough performance, etc. Those are the best uses I can come up with for when it's no longer a baby, and it can't do any of those things right now. Again, the most useful things seem to be tech demo and benchmark, even if it could play Doom and run a LAMP server.

I know I'm buried, but I don't know where I can legitimately inject this...

Spend 15 minutes here. If you understand what's going on, you can start taking it more seriously -- pick a language/community (I recommend Ruby), ask around for the best books on the language, and get the fundamentals of the language down. This may not be as instantly gratifying, since you'll be on a commandline most of the time, but it'll work. Then move on to frameworks, pick a solid open source one, and build what you want to build.

Oh, and learn Git, somewhere between learning the language and learning the framework. You're going to need version control, and distributed means it's easier to start with, and it scales. Plus you'll be able to use Github.

Or you could learn just enough to put something together with PHP, but the result is going to be yet another program by a non-technical person. That means bugs, vulnerabilities, inefficiency, classic design mistakes, unmaintainability, and just generally bad things.

The question is, really: Do you want to become technical? Or are you just looking to cut out the technical middleman?

You don't have to install anything to use PHP (let your webhoster take care of that),

There are hosts out there which provide Ruby on Rails stacks, so this is irrelevant.

you can see the results immediately in not just a sandbox but *in your actual browser*

You can do that with any language. In fact, this is even faster to set up. Seriously.

It's really easy to get started, and there's an online, interactive ruby tutorial