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Programming For Terrified Adults?
makeitreal writes "My mom is getting bored with learning the basics of email and has mastered Solitaire. She asked me what I do on my computer and I told her that I was teaching myself programming in Scheme. She expressed an interest in learning what I was doing, but I tried to teach it to her with the HtDP and we didn't even get past the introductory chapter. Everything I've looked at so far seems too complicated (Scheme, Python, VB) or too childish (Logo, Squeak, Lego Mindstorms). Is there anything in the middle that is also cheap/free and suitable for adults? Or should I give up the whole idea?"
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No GUI will make things easier to learn it, and it's nowhere as bad as C++.
There's also a web based language, like PHP / ASP, or Perl. It's not hard to begin with, even though it can become more complicated as time goes on.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
I have no idea if they still make it.
But Hypercard was *perfect* for people who wanted to get their feet wet but were totally scared of everything
If you want something a little more advanced: bash shell scripting. Easy to learn and obviously very very powerful.
Sunny Dubey
In conclusion I think that the best are probably BASIC or Python, and I would lean to the latter. And no matter how much you want to help her yourself, I would suggest getting her a good book on the language to read. Preferable one geared to new programmers (instead of a "___ for C++ programmers" type books, or a massive tome of everything in the language).
Hope that helps. I'll answer any questions on the why I think such and such about the languages above or any other language if you just reply to this.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Teach her to write some Excel macros. First, this is somewhat of a valuable skill (using Excel cuts accross many professions) and second, it's very obvious what's going on.
It's more than just adding values in cells. How about taking 2 cells with a time format (eg, 1 pm and 6:15pm) and having a third cell display the number of hours in between (5.25 in this case)... You can get pretty fancy with Excel programming or you can keep it very simple. By the time she grasps the finer points of programming in Excel, she'll grasp much of programming (though probably not of good programming practices) in general.
Though the question remains: why?
Ecce Europa - Web Design for Business
Maybe you should look at these with her. You might think they are too complicated or childish, but she may not. In fact, she might surprise you with what she likes.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
While TCL is a little odd, it isn't odder than some of the other languages you listed and it has the best integration to the wonderful Tk toolkit of any of them. Nowadays it is important to show a new programmer they can create 'real' programs and in their mind that isn't tty apps, it is graphical user interfaces. TCL/Tk is perfect for that purpose. It is also more than able to create useful programs and is cross platform.
Democrat delenda est
If you are just trying to do basic programming constructs, pick something that has a good IDE, good error messages and can take a cheese sandwich, compile it and run it. Some of the errors from Java and Java script are pretty sad ( "is not an Object" is always helpful to me).
Logo, Basic, Pascal, Fortran, Squeek, etc. are all easy to learn the concepts with. I say start with one of them. You can always move her to something else later on.
The other options are to build her a Wiki and let her generate content (family news, ancestors, stories, garden info, hobbies, etc. Wiki presentation can be considered some level of programming (and slightly easier to understand than HTML).
Good luck, and remember your Mom raised you, so when she does not get the quirky points of Perl you are trying to teach her, don't yell at her.
I always thought that Scheme and Logo were basically the same thing. Aside from some simple syntax differences and possibly scoping, I have always thought of logo as scheme with a drawing turtle. In fact one of the first things that I did in the first computer science class I took was first making a Scheme interpreter in Scheme and then making a Logo interpreter written in Scheme, which didn't require many changes. Anyway, you can do some pretty complex things with some simple languages. I would use Logo to draw some cool fractals.
I know it's not particularly marketable, but I've always thought Pascal was an excellent learning language. Pointers, structures, dynamic memory allocation... and simpler syntax than C. In my experience, most people learning programming via VB get bogged down in UI tweaking, and the C/C++ learners get bogged down in the &*&! syntax. Java leaners tend to get confused with OO when they haven't yet been exposed to variable scope, and functional decomposition, etc. Again, in my experience. Pascal is simple enough to get started quickly, but rich enough to let the learner grow into the advanced concepts. It's a gateway language - it makes learning C/++/#,Java, etc. much less intimidating. Although, for "Holy Crap, I made something!" value, VB's prety good. In no time at all you can make something that looks "just like a real windows application" (with all the inherent reliability ) I guess it all comes down to how much you want to spend on 'fundamentals' and how much you want to spend on, well, let's be honest, 'fun and cool stuff'. Ultimately, for some, it comes down to not choosing the right language, but the right project - start something simple and then keep pushing and pushing it. Maybe start with some HTML, move onto JavaScript (where you can get into parameter passing, functions, syntax, and control structures) and from there maybe into database or media stuff, depending on what would be fun to do next.