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How To Teach a 12-Year-Old To Program?
thelordx writes "I've got a much younger brother who I'd like to teach how to program. When I was younger, you'd often start off with something like BASIC or Apple BASIC, maybe move on to Pascal, and eventually get to C and Java. Is something like Pascal still a dominant teaching language? I'd love to get low-level with him, and I firmly believe that C is the best language to eventually learn, but I'm not sure how to get him there. Can anyone recommend a language I can start to teach him that is simple enough to learn quickly, but powerful enough to do interesting things and lead him down a path towards C/C++?"
"before you get into heavy stuff like operator overloading or inheritance."
Never get deeply into either, operator overloading just obfusticates function calls, and in C++ is simply a twee excuse for not making strings a first class type, huge design error in C++, every idiot I see is writing a new string package, since it took years(decades) to get StdLib standardised, so the idiots read that and think they should do it too. When I do a code review I read the code first and mark up all the re-invented wheels and demand an explanation for them, it is all NEW code that needs to be DEBUGGED.
Inheritance is not the be all and end all of OO design, problem decomposition is. Mutual inheritance is (almost) always wrong and class heirarchies need to be simple and naturally follow the problem.
If I tell a developer to analyse a situation and I get the response "I will go and write a class" I know I have a looser.
Another word about tools, if confronted with a huge mass of incomprehensible C++, SourceNavigator, originally from Cygnus Solutions but OS'd bt Red Hat is really useful.