I learned to program on an Apple ][, where the programming environment was always a CTRL+RESET away. BASIC was great. I carefully typed long programs that I fou

I learned to program on an Apple ][, where the programming environment was always a CTRL+RESET away. BASIC was great. I carefully typed long programs that I found in the back of computer magazines, broke them by changing stuff, and fiddled around endlessly. Those incantations are still in my fingers (CALL -3116 for a nice visual effect, PEEK -16384 for the current keyboard key, VTAB and HTAB to get around the screen, etc). I volunteer at a local Coder Dojo and there's nothing to give these kids who want to fiddle around like that. Scratch is the closest I've found (with the bonus of not having to necessarily be able to read or type), but it's still cluttered with logins and passwords... and, being a GUI, it suffers when the kid's computer doesn't have a big enough screen to manage the complexity they eventually create. It's a shame. I tell kids who've grown tired of Scratch that they can "graduate" to Stencyl, a game engine that uses a similar visual programming metaphor but lets you drop down to the Haxe beneath. It also compiles natively to desktop or mobile, so that's cool too. Python, ruby, and JS are all really close to the ideal "type and go" environments, but they're also littered with speedbumps. Installing packages and keeping the environment sane are difficult enough for some professional engineers, let alone kids who just want to mess around and make cool stuff. The woman who started my local Coder Dojo got her son started with his own Linux computer at a really young age and he's a whiz at it, so maybe there's no real problem here and I'm just underestimating the ingenuity of these kids. They'll get it done if they really want it, I guess? EDIT: Kinda apropos, but check this out! http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/ http://beagle.applearchives.com/the_posters/ I would've killed for these posters when I was a kid.