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3 points by jsgrahamus 4350 days ago | link | parent

I liked the fact that you included easy graphics in your language. That is a way to immediately involve the student in a medium that they presumably already like and are acquainted with.

It reminds me of Logo, which was also targeted at youth, and included graphics primitives. I used it myself to create some drawings to help us hang pictures :=)

I wonder about some of your choices. The Goto in 1 example reminds me of spaghetti coding, and probably some of the early programs I wrote. Logo, on the other hand (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29), included other branching commands which lend to better programming practices. It also included parameter passing, etc. Might be good to take a look. Children are capable of amazing things.



2 points by mohamedsa 4350 days ago | link

I decided when writing Kalimat to enable a teacher - if they so choose - to remove all sorts of abstraction and write code that resembles how it's going to run. When dealing with a child I think learning to code is more important than learning to code well, and removing all obstacles for that is a good design choice.

This way, the student can go directly into writing interesting programs using only if/goto/expressions. Later they can learn more disciplined forms like procedures or OOP, also included.

But I don't want to impose my ideas on users; if the teacher disagrees with me, they can completely ignore goto and use other control structures!

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