>I struggle to find a recent language that he can pick up and start having a rewarding experience, like I did with VB. For kids, I recommend Javascript in the

>I struggle to find a recent language that he can pick up and start having a rewarding experience, like I did with VB. For kids, I recommend Javascript in the web browser. My friend is showing it to his 10-year old son and it's working out great. Javascript benefits include free development tool (notepad or textmate) and cross-platform (Win/Mac/Linux). Javascript will be around for the next 50 years. In my opinion, all the other candidate languages (Python, VB, C#, Java Android, etc) have too much friction in terms of setup (download, then install, etc). One drawback is that it's hard to deploy Javascript as a self-contained exe unless you include paid tools such as Adobe Flex with ActionScript. (That was another strength of VB -- the ability to compile to an exe with a small msvbvm.dll dependency.) But then again, a lot of kids have their own smartphones so he could type out a Javascript game on the pc, fire up a web server on the home wifi, and then point his phone's web browser to it. Instant deployment and gratification.