+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.
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!
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've been a fan of, and a hacker of LOAD81 since antirez released it, and have put it in tons of places in order to induce hackerdom on kids and adults, alike. Its one of my favourite projects to bust out when someone tells me they want a low-impact, easy way of learning programming.
And since then, I've helped a few of those aspiring programmers become Lua gods! LOAD81 is really a gateway to a lot of wonderful things .. easy/simple programming in Lua, to SDL .. to the Lua VM .. to exending LOAD81 .. to an introduction to antirez other cool projects (redis, lol!) and on it goes ..
So, thank you antirez, this is probably one of my most cloned repo's over the years. ;) I should probably clean up some of my PR's and give you a bit of a laugh to review, one of these days (I added sfxr for sound effects, joystick support, MIDI and a few other things along the way ..)
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.
I learned to program in Codea since I only had access to an iPad when I was younger. I published my first game on the App Store with it and threw me into the world of Objective-C. I'm really glad to see people are still using it to learn to program.
To this day, I still believe it's one of the best ways to learn to program:
- You're exposed to low-level primitives instead of complicated high-level frameworks (like Unity) that abstract the fun/educational code away.
- The Lua manual is arguably the best programming manual for students learning to program.
- Includes a built-in GLSL shader editor makes advanced graphics programming a small stepping stone.
- They automatically shipped in-depth examples with the app that are intentionally built for learning by reading the code.
- In-app docs encouraged discovering new APIs; I took it as a challenge to use all of the APIs they exposed and learned a lot in the process.
- No package managers, no complicated install steps, no security concerns, and a unified editor.
P.S. If you have an iPad and haven't played Two Lives Left's Crabitron [1] – it's easily the most creative game shipped for iPad.
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've taught programming to beginners a fair bit, adults, teens, and children, in several languages, and lua is the worst of them.
The initial learning hump in programming is difficult and frustrating and lua does nothing to alleviate that. The main resource learners do have is curiosity, and usually an interest in some goal like making a game or website for a particular purpose.
Lua gets them bogged down in writing string manipulation functions that aren't in the standard library or whatever. One of the main things learners want to do is make an http request to an api, you need a library for that. There's no obvious & reliable way to get one, now your beginners are trying to configure luarocks or compile C modules.
To be clear lua is fine, great even, it's an incredible technical accomplishment. But the spiritual admiration experienced programmers have for the simplicity of implementation does not matter to a beginner. Its minimal standard lib and flexible distribution methods are a liability to teaching. I've never seen a language more reliably kill that learner's spark that is the best asset of someone new to coding.
This is somewhat alleviated if you're using it in a controlled environment for a specific goal, like roblox scripting or love. I've had success with that and would do it again. But as a general introduction to programming it's terrible.
In industrial settings we use ladder logic diagrams, a visual programming language based off of electrical ladder diagrams, and I wholeheartedly agree with this. It is so much easier discussing Python web scraping programs compared to explaining ladder logic. Though the latter was made easier with physical inputs/outputs some are located a good distance away from the PLC, and anything digital had to be shown to be effectively discussed.
Turtle graphics is one of the "batteries" included with Python; I used Python with the turtle library to introduce my nephew to some of the basics of programming a few years ago. Even got to show him function definitions by first coding each instance of a repeated part of the picture separately, and then saying "Now this is what programmers call 'refactoring'" and then pulling the repeated bit out into a function with different call sites and parameters.
He was excited enough about it to want to learn about robotics and aspire to be a programmer for Mars rovers and the like.
The nice thing about Python is that because it's so pervasive as a teaching language, there are many tools for it that specifically cater to this niche. In particular, https://thonny.org is very nice for explaining basic programming concepts like expression evaluation and function calls.
And yeah, turtle graphics is the time-honored method of teaching things like loops, recursion, and parametrization via functions step by step in a way that is visually intuitive. Things like polygons, stars, spirals, and eventually basic fractals like snowflakes and ferns.
Readit News
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).
Dead Comment
https://p5js.org/
It's based on Scala, supports turtle (imperative) graphics, picture (functional) graphics, gaming at different levels (imperative, functional, OO), and more...
And since then, I've helped a few of those aspiring programmers become Lua gods! LOAD81 is really a gateway to a lot of wonderful things .. easy/simple programming in Lua, to SDL .. to the Lua VM .. to exending LOAD81 .. to an introduction to antirez other cool projects (redis, lol!) and on it goes ..
So, thank you antirez, this is probably one of my most cloned repo's over the years. ;) I should probably clean up some of my PR's and give you a bit of a laugh to review, one of these days (I added sfxr for sound effects, joystick support, MIDI and a few other things along the way ..)
To this day, I still believe it's one of the best ways to learn to program:
- You're exposed to low-level primitives instead of complicated high-level frameworks (like Unity) that abstract the fun/educational code away.
- The Lua manual is arguably the best programming manual for students learning to program.
- Includes a built-in GLSL shader editor makes advanced graphics programming a small stepping stone.
- They automatically shipped in-depth examples with the app that are intentionally built for learning by reading the code.
- In-app docs encouraged discovering new APIs; I took it as a challenge to use all of the APIs they exposed and learned a lot in the process.
- No package managers, no complicated install steps, no security concerns, and a unified editor.
P.S. If you have an iPad and haven't played Two Lives Left's Crabitron [1] – it's easily the most creative game shipped for iPad.
[1] https://apps.apple.com/se/app/crabitron/id440462182?l=en
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).
The initial learning hump in programming is difficult and frustrating and lua does nothing to alleviate that. The main resource learners do have is curiosity, and usually an interest in some goal like making a game or website for a particular purpose.
Lua gets them bogged down in writing string manipulation functions that aren't in the standard library or whatever. One of the main things learners want to do is make an http request to an api, you need a library for that. There's no obvious & reliable way to get one, now your beginners are trying to configure luarocks or compile C modules.
To be clear lua is fine, great even, it's an incredible technical accomplishment. But the spiritual admiration experienced programmers have for the simplicity of implementation does not matter to a beginner. Its minimal standard lib and flexible distribution methods are a liability to teaching. I've never seen a language more reliably kill that learner's spark that is the best asset of someone new to coding.
This is somewhat alleviated if you're using it in a controlled environment for a specific goal, like roblox scripting or love. I've had success with that and would do it again. But as a general introduction to programming it's terrible.
He was excited enough about it to want to learn about robotics and aspire to be a programmer for Mars rovers and the like.
And yeah, turtle graphics is the time-honored method of teaching things like loops, recursion, and parametrization via functions step by step in a way that is visually intuitive. Things like polygons, stars, spirals, and eventually basic fractals like snowflakes and ferns.
https://dragonruby.itch.io/dragonruby-gtk