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I'm looking for a easy way to introduce programming to my kids. In my time Pascal was the way to do it. There was an integrated IDE, one click build, simple sy

I'm looking for a easy way to introduce programming to my kids. In my time Pascal was the way to do it. There was an integrated IDE, one click build, simple syntax, ways to output text and graphics. User interface / forms had to be built from scratch though. Interfacing with mouse meant using interrupts. Nowadays?? - Java swing: Java is pretty straightforward but I could never get the layouting engine to do what I wanted. - .NET windows forms. Same as above except using c/c++/c# - web development. The modern build pipeline with transpilation, gulp, nodeJS etc is way too complex. Perhaps plain HTML + plain CSS + plain JS would be possible to grasp by a kid. - Android?? In theory we get an integrated entry into developing full stack applications in pretty much one language (Java / Kotlin) + some XML. The layouting is problematic again. Easy tings that can be done with visual editor + mouse are achievable. More custom layouts quickly enter into the same layouting engine magic we had in Swing, CSS.

iudqnolq 6y ago
Take a look at Elixir, possibly with Phoenix and/or Phoenix liveview. If you don't need extremely complex UIs everything can be Elixir, HTML, and CSS.
lxdesk 6y ago
I say, go back to basics - literally. There are still many "games BASIC" languages around. Some are attached to or reproduce retrocomputing environments like QB64, FreeBASIC and BASIC8(plus a plethora of modern BASICs that target old platforms, like Altirra BASIC, BasiEgaXorz, batari Basic), some are pretty modernized like Cerberus X and AOZ Studio. The thing they all have in common is that they get the tooling and deployment challenges out of the way pretty quickly, and they abstract out enough functionality into APIs that you can start doing flashy things quickly. For writing a GUI app, look to Python and TK or wx. Those are not too awful to get started with(well, TK particularly, wx is cluttered with boilerplate). Or for a form-editor approach, Lazarus - the current open-source successor to the Pascal lineage.
jmmv 6y ago
That’s precisely why I’m building https://jmmv.github.io/endbasic https://jmmv.github.io/endbasic :-)

iudqnolq 6y ago

Take a look at Elixir, possibly with Phoenix and/or Phoenix liveview. If you don't need extremely complex UIs everything can be Elixir, HTML, and CSS.

lxdesk 6y ago

I say, go back to basics - literally. There are still many "games BASIC" languages around. Some are attached to or reproduce retrocomputing environments like QB64, FreeBASIC and BASIC8(plus a plethora of modern BASICs that target old platforms, like Altirra BASIC, BasiEgaXorz, batari Basic), some are pretty modernized like Cerberus X and AOZ Studio. The thing they all have in common is that they get the tooling and deployment challenges out of the way pretty quickly, and they abstract out enough functionality into APIs that you can start doing flashy things quickly. For writing a GUI app, look to Python and TK or wx. Those are not too awful to get started with(well, TK particularly, wx is cluttered with boilerplate). Or for a form-editor approach, Lazarus - the current open-source successor to the Pascal lineage.

jmmv 6y ago

That’s precisely why I’m building https://jmmv.github.io/endbasic https://jmmv.github.io/endbasic :-)