Thursday, November 27, 2008

Finally, a simple BASIC for kids

I've been looking for almost a year for a very simple programming environment to get my kids started in programming - obviously BASIC comes to mind...but couldn't find any!!!


I know, it's unbelievable that there was no easy to use BASIC environment in the year 2008, but I'm not alone in that quest, read Why Johnny Can't Code.



Finally, I found and downloaded today a "simple basic" from the big "evil" dogs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/cc950524.aspx.



It works, it's very simple. It can have a litle more glitz in how it indicates the errors, but I love the content assist, although it doesn't actually complete the arguments but hey...it's better than Z80...



Sweet, now i don't have to explain to my 8 year-old why he needs "static void main (String[] argv)" to write "Hello, Andrei".