Apologies for my many disorganized thoughts here. Consider also soliciting suggestions from mothers. Do you think Elixir will help him solve a problem that i

Apologies for my many disorganized thoughts here. Consider also soliciting suggestions from mothers. Do you think Elixir will help him solve a problem that is interesting to him? Kids would probably be most immediately motivated by a language that allows them to execute interesting effects right away. Declarations, definitions, and tautological wiring are all probably the least interesting things. I don't know if "spoiling" a budding programmer is really a thing. However, I suspect it may be easier to go up the ladder of abstraction than down. For example, after using a primitive line-oriented version of BASIC as a kid for a while, I wanted more structured constructs, and could understand how those structures worked in terms of conditional jumps etc. I accidentally introduced my son to PICO-8 (which uses Lua). I was evaluating alternatives, he noticed the icon for it and asked about it, and that was that. He hasn't done much programming with it; he's more interested in drawing and making music. Then again, he's only six years old. I think the specialized screens for editing graphics and music make it easier for him to just not think about programming at all, in a way that wouldn't be true if he had to draw graphics with LINE(x1,y1,x2,y2) etc. In short, probably don't use PICO-8. My start with primitive BASIC dialects is probably biasing me, but if there were a fake assembly language with a simplified interface for interacting with the environment (sound, graphics, text input), that sounds like it would be ideal. You don't even need to understand block structures to start with this sort of thing.