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Comment by richardjordan | Hacker News Reader

Ha! So true.

I am currently teaching my 8yo programming, or rather in the process of building a set of teaching tools for her - right now things are very early stage, and she's busy playing VIM Adventures to familiarize herself to the keyboard and keystrokes. I'm trying to decide between Ruby and Python, which has the highly recommended Snake Wrangling For Kids going for it.

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There's KidsRuby and Hackety Hack on the Ruby side.

Opinionated advice: go full Python or Javascript! Being exposed to first class functions and higher order functions, without needing to wrap your head around OOP or even simple things like code blocks gives you a clear and "functional ready mind": after Python you can jump into Javascript or just as well into Haskell. From Ruby you have a little "baby wall" to climb when you go out of it to the larger world.

Scratch is another option, much simpler than a ruby-based tool (it's fully visual) but dramatically more accessible. My 5 year old can't get enough of it; tonight we covered the Cartesian plane. Kids will probably outgrow it after a couple years since it has no means of abstraction, but it's superb at grabbing their attention.

Currently been going through HacketyHack with her... she just made a star appear on the screen :-)

There are some small issues with Hackety, including one bug in a tutorial. We're working hard on fixing our big upstream dependency before being able to do another release, but please let me know what you think.

If you do decide to do some Python:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/turtle.html

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