It is interesting to see how much has changed in the past 20 years or so. It used to be that terminal was the standard when it came to learning ones first lan

It is interesting to see how much has changed in the past 20 years or so. It used to be that terminal was the standard when it came to learning ones first language (think BASIC in most of computers in 80s). EDIT: I wanted to criticize the choice of learning programming by starting with something as unwieldy and bloated as Eclipse and Java. My mind changed, as I read about Karel language. Starting with a simple language that can actually do something then gradually building up is great for learning. However, one point still stands, BASIC was basically one level down the abstraction from machine code, while Karel is now four levels down. This is the inevitable price of progress just like we can't build a toaster completely from scratch(http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch.html http://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toast...).