Ummm, if you read www.theymightbegiants.com down to the bottom of the page, you'll see that TMBG has tried and had reliability problems with computerized answering systems. Remember, these guys don't want a hack, they want something that can take slashdot sized loads and is easy to keep up:
Yes, after months of pure frustration with our computer based system, John and John have returned to the analog scene of the phone machine, and although the songs don't change as frequently, they are fresh fresh fresh and now we have a two song policy so you get more songs with every call.
I think the point is they want simple, effective, and reliable. No fancy voice-navigated nested menuing solutions required, just something that will work for literaly decades without dieing.
You should make the decision the same way you would choose a computer language for your own projects. Choose the right language for the task you want it to do. Start with the question "What do my kids want to program?" If your kids are like any others I know, they don't care one iota about the regular expression capabilities of perl or the file i/o capabilities of c.
If what they want to do is write games then the things that will top their list of priorities are
easy access to video and sound output
good input capabilities (keyboard, mouse, joystick)
easy to load graphics, music from outside sources
reasonably fast
easy to debug
Unfortunately, I'm a little out of date to comment on what language will best meet these requirements running under windows 98. (My experience has gone BasicA,C=64 basic,True Basic,C=64 assembler,Turbo Pascal,Turbo C++,C,Java,... and I don't think any of these are the right solution for you.) Visual basic may be a good answer. If there is a nice windows C++ IDE that makes graphics and sound easy, that might also be good.
The other direction their interests might easily go is to the web. If they think the internet is the coolest thing ever, then the place to start is building a webpage (write the HTML by hand of course) and work on making it come alive with Javascript and finally move up to Java or server-side scripting.
Anyway, the important thing is to choose the language to fit the job, not because its aimed at children. Your kids will quickly become bored with any language, no matter how well designed or clever, that can't do what they want it to.
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If what they want to do is write games then the things that will top their list of priorities are
- easy access to video and sound output
- good input capabilities (keyboard, mouse, joystick)
- easy to load graphics, music from outside sources
- reasonably fast
- easy to debug
Unfortunately, I'm a little out of date to comment on what language will best meet these requirements running under windows 98. (My experience has gone BasicA,C=64 basic,True Basic,C=64 assembler,Turbo Pascal,Turbo C++,C,Java,... and I don't think any of these are the right solution for you.) Visual basic may be a good answer. If there is a nice windows C++ IDE that makes graphics and sound easy, that might also be good.The other direction their interests might easily go is to the web. If they think the internet is the coolest thing ever, then the place to start is building a webpage (write the HTML by hand of course) and work on making it come alive with Javascript and finally move up to Java or server-side scripting.
Anyway, the important thing is to choose the language to fit the job, not because its aimed at children. Your kids will quickly become bored with any language, no matter how well designed or clever, that can't do what they want it to.