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Comment by SeanDav | Hacker News Reader

Rather than simplify Javascript and protect beginners from themselves, why not start with a language that is both powerful and protective and yet easy to learn, like Pascal - learn the basics there in a more structured language?

Lazarus is a free, cross platform IDE for Pascal and an excellent place to start: http://www.lazarus-ide.org/

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There's two things to getting people into programming - giving them tools they can learn with and making them care about it. You do the second by letting them accomplish things they actually want to do. Until you can script webpages or make Minecraft mods in Pascal, it's not very good at the second half of the equation.

Precisely correct! Adding authenticity and relevance to the first major learning experience is crucial for appealing to a wide array of beginners, especially people who don't necessarily see programming as a first-order joy.

Pascal is a complete nightmare to start people off with if they are going to move on to a language like JavaScript, Python, Ruby, C# or Java.

It's superficially similar but it has all kinds of archaic quirks and lacks basic affordances like return values or short-circuiting (i.e. in order to evaluate `a AND b` Pascal evaluates both).

You might as well argue that beginners should start with Assembly. If you want to be unnecessarily cruel at least teach them something useful like C/C++.

I agree! Moreover, why not let beginners start with a language they could actually use in real life?

On the one hand, it can be a little cruel to lock a kid in with a wolf, even a bound and crippled one. On the other hand, maybe it's actually kind to do so when the world outside is filled with wolves.

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