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Re: [seul-edu] Language to teach 10 year olds

On Sun, Jul 15, 2001 at 10:25:43PM -0400, James Oden wrote:
> I cannot speak for PHP (but I am sure a hello world program 
> could (-; )

Hehe :)  Here you go:

  <html><head><title> Baby's First PHP Program </title></head>

  <!-- You should ALWAYS specify ALL colors if you specify ANY! -->
  <body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" link="#0000FF"
  vlink="#FF0000" alink="#FF00FF">

  <?php echo "Hello world"; ?>

  </body></html>


Anyway... just to throw my 2c in... HTML is useless as far as teaching
someone how to "program."  PHP and Perl are actual programming _languages_.

However, Perl is, IMHO, way too difficult to use as a way to teach
programming concepts.  PHP is too specific to HTML content generation,
and also appears to have the same problem Perl does (but to a lesser
degree) - too many ways to do the same thing.


I feel languages which were specifically designed to be teaching tools
are the best ones to use to teach.  I learned BASIC as a kid, and used
it for about 8 years before I took a class in Pascal at my high school.
(That made the move over to C much easier, BTW)

As popular as languages like C++, Java and Perl are, I would personally
_avoid_ teaching them to kids until they're proficient in _programming_. ;)


YMMV, IANA-Teacher, etc. etc. etc.

-bill!