Let’s not forget P5js which has a long and esteemed history of helping to teach kids and more to program. It’s browser based so it’s compatible with every OS and requires no install. FOSS with an active community of users and contributors. I personally taught some middle schoolers with zero programming experience how to make interactive monsters in 1 hour. It was awesome!
+1 to LÖVE, it's a capable rapid prototyping tool. I learned programming on QBasic, but if I were starting out today then LÖVE is the tool I would want to be handed.
Shameless plug for my own offering in this area - Kojo (15 years old and still going strong!): https://www.kogics.net/kojo
It's based on Scala, supports turtle (imperative) graphics, picture (functional) graphics, gaming at different levels (imperative, functional, OO), and more...
I was looking for something to teach 11-year-olds a couple of years ago, and ended up using Python with a turtle graphics library; this would have been another great alternative.
Programming using a language like Lua has the advantage over Scratch-like environments (which a friend suggested I use instead) that you can talk about your code more easily if it is based on keyboard entry of keywords and operators
rather than GUI events (such as moving graphical blocks by drag and drop) - although that is based on my intuition rather than backed up by any empirical study (please let me know if you are aware of one to support or refute this).
Lua as a teaching language’s got a strength for everyone - if you’re a pragmatic person, Lua offers a fantastic offramp to gamedev; if you’re a theoretically-inclined person, Lua’s an elegant language - and it’s wonderful to formative programming experiences with elegant languages. (I started with SICP Scheme.)
Anything like this should be compared to Love2D which is the gold standard. LuaJIT and lots of great libraries wrapped into extremely simple lua functions.
Let’s not forget P5js which has a long and esteemed history of helping to teach kids and more to program. It’s browser based so it’s compatible with every OS and requires no install. FOSS with an active community of users and contributors. I personally taught some middle schoolers with zero programming experience how to make interactive monsters in 1 hour. It was awesome!
https://p5js.org/
Title should say it's 13 years old and currently unmaintained.
BTW: a modern, maintained alternative (With Python instead of Lua) would be Pyxel (https://github.com/kitao/pyxel -> discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40899520).
There are several alternatives using Lua too, including for instance PICO-8 https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php
And TIC-80 (https://tic80.com/). It can be used with "lua, ruby, js, moon, fennel, scheme, squirrel, wren, wasm, janet or python".
Processing and LÖVE are also similar.
+1 to LÖVE, it's a capable rapid prototyping tool. I learned programming on QBasic, but if I were starting out today then LÖVE is the tool I would want to be handed.
It has a few changes dinduring 2020. Were all of them reverted?
Shameless plug for my own offering in this area - Kojo (15 years old and still going strong!): https://www.kogics.net/kojo
It's based on Scala, supports turtle (imperative) graphics, picture (functional) graphics, gaming at different levels (imperative, functional, OO), and more...
I was looking for something to teach 11-year-olds a couple of years ago, and ended up using Python with a turtle graphics library; this would have been another great alternative.
Programming using a language like Lua has the advantage over Scratch-like environments (which a friend suggested I use instead) that you can talk about your code more easily if it is based on keyboard entry of keywords and operators rather than GUI events (such as moving graphical blocks by drag and drop) - although that is based on my intuition rather than backed up by any empirical study (please let me know if you are aware of one to support or refute this).
Lua as a teaching language’s got a strength for everyone - if you’re a pragmatic person, Lua offers a fantastic offramp to gamedev; if you’re a theoretically-inclined person, Lua’s an elegant language - and it’s wonderful to formative programming experiences with elegant languages. (I started with SICP Scheme.)
I taught a class where we began with Blockly compiling to Lua, and slowly shifted to just Lua as the kids' programs expanded.
Awesome, I'm working on something similar: https://lua.civboot.org
Another programming environment for kids with its own simple programming language: https://easylang.online/ide/
the dragonruby game engine looks similar.
https://dragonruby.itch.io/dragonruby-gtk
What is antirez doing these days? His github history suddenly dropped to zero it seems.
Hi! Mostly writing, embedded programming and some AI stuff. Thanks for the interest :) and right now enjoying NYC.
He wrote a science-fiction book, then did some things with e-ink hardware and some with AI.
Anything like this should be compared to Love2D which is the gold standard. LuaJIT and lots of great libraries wrapped into extremely simple lua functions.
Did antirez receive any of the upsides from Redis commercialization? Or was that another group that took his code and ran with it?
I believe he sold his participation on the redis company far before the shit show.
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Please don't do programming language flamewar on HN. We've been trying since the beginning to avoid that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nah, Lua's great.