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Last year I added a touch of programming to my 9 year old son's home school activities. We tried several learning tools, starting with Scratch. I don't have a

Last year I added a touch of programming to my 9 year old son's home school activities. We tried several learning tools, starting with Scratch. I don't have anything negative to say about the various options we tried. However, the most positive exercise was him going through the "Prof Stef" tutorial built into Pharo. He really got into exploring and interacting with objects using tradition Smalltalk inspectors and workspaces (Do it, Show it, Inspect it). He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was. As a father, I loved that I didn't feel like a fraud as I could easily help him dig around and answer just about any question on what's really going on.

crististm 12y ago
"He loved that he could close the environment and open it the next day with all his play right where it was." - I can't understand how such a basic functionality is missing from all the popular IDEs and text-editors-turned-IDEs. It blows my mind that people don't see what an IDE should look like and what it should do.
- Padding 12y ago
  It's all tradeoffs. There are clear benefits to your IDE remaining unaffected regardless of how badly your program messes up. Not to mention being able to get your code out of the IDE easily (for versioning, backup, deployment and whatever else). Or having code that is readable/understandable and deployable without an IDE.