citizen428

This is why so many of us are so much into Emacs. In a time where pretty much all software around us gets progressively enshittified, there’s this 50 year old Lisp interpreter masquerading as an editor that you can make truly and uniquely yours.

~16.5k, mostly from Ruby where I'm currently #10 in the All Time answers list (and accordingly also the 10th user to get the gold Ruby badge).

Thanks, added both of them :-)

Nothing to be sorry about, thanks for spreading it! Site's back up now :-)

And it's back. Turns out the problem wasn't really the traffic but a problem with the MongoDB setup...

Yes, I had noticed that before and fixed it before I read this thread. Thanks for pointing it out though!

Yes, I see lots of 503s in my Heroku logs :-( This is a pet project, so I don't wanna pay for it, which means you all probably have to live with this until the initial wave of traffic dies down again, sorry!

Yes, but I already owned that domain and since it's a just for fun side project, I didn't really feel like spending money on a new one.

I'm the guy who runs HappyNerds.net, thanks for all the attention, but it looks like my free little Heroku account can't handle it :-/

You know, there was a reason that post was tagged "rant". It wasn't meant as a position on anything, just a little rambling on my private blog. I didn't expect it to be read by anyone except my few regular readers and am frankly quite surprised it showed up here. I do appreciate the input however.

Being the OP I have to say I hesitated a bit before adding the quote, which wasn't in the original version of the post. I've done a fair amount of reading on the Cuban revolution, and mostly agree with your assessment of Che. The actual quote reflected my mood at the time of writing though, so I still chose to include it. Disagreeing with someone on a majority of things, does not mean that I can't quote them on the ones where we do, does it?

I put together a website collecting links to various programming languages/environments specifically targeting children (if anybody wants to make a prettier stylesheet for it, let me know):

http://www.happynerds.net/

Generally I'd advise starting with something interactive and fun, like eToys or Mindstorms. After that a project like Hackety Hack, Löve or Processing might be a good bridge into more "serious" programming. Some people also seem to like the HTML and JavaScript approach, because the development environment (a browser) is available virtually everywhere and it has a very short feedback cycle. I'm not too convinced of that, but YMMV.

Once your kid has the basics down, possibilities are almost endless. There's a plethora of freely available books (legally), of which I compiled a small subset here:

http://citizen428.net/archives/434

I'm also involved in teaching Ruby courses on RubyLearning.org, and while definitely not targeted at 10 year olds, our core Ruby course should be doable for a motivated teenager willing to learn.

Whatever you do, I think the most important thing is to focus on the fun. If kids enjoy what they do, they can learn super fast and will happily come back for more :-)