I love Ruby, and it made perfect sense when I started learning it at 13. The syntax is so natural. The only issue is what she wants to do with it. I was tilted

I love Ruby, and it made perfect sense when I started learning it at 13. The syntax is so natural. The only issue is what she wants to do with it. I was tilted a bit towards wanting to do "real" programming, so I had no problem with the fact that I've still never actually done anything with a GUI (well, the browser is basically a GUI for your Rails/Sinatra apps). There are ways to do GUI's with Ruby, and it doesn't look too hard, but it's not as simple as it would be in, say, VB, or probably even Java. But don't give her VB or you'll scare her away from coding forever. If she does want to do GUI's, you could checkout http://shoes.heroku.com/ http://shoes.heroku.com/ Never used it, but I hear it's pretty good.