On est encore loin des Etoys ;-)
Début du message réexpédié :
1. The Kid's Programming Language
by Martin Heller
When I was a 9th-grader interested in programming, my math teacher pointed me at the "computer lab," where the school had one IBM computer. This being 1965, the computer used drum memory, had a hexadecimal instruction set, and had an IBM manual for that instruction set. Period. I didn't get very far with that: our computer club, working together, eventually developed a program for generating the value of pi. It could spit out one digit every 5 or 6 seconds--and that was after optimizing the instruction interleave for the drum rotation speed.
Fast forward 40 years. Here it is 2005, and I'm programming on 3 GHz Pentium IV computers with sophisticated integrated development environments like Visual Studio 2005 and Eclipse, in object-oriented languages like C#, Visual Basic .NET and Java. If you think about it, Visual Studio and Eclipse offer just as great a barrier to a young beginning programmer as that ancient IBM box, except that it's the opposite barrier: instead of having to learn to program with no tools at all, the new programmer now has to learn to use incredibly powerful and complex tools in order to program.
There's Logo, of course, and StarLogo in particular. But Logo doesn't provide a great transition to object-oriented languages.
A new, free alternative is the Kid's Programming Language (KPL), from Morrison Schwartz. Jon Schwartz is a Microsoft alumnus; Walt Morrison is an alumnus of NCR and Costco. KPL is the brainchild of their third core team member, Jonah Stagner, who wrote it to teach his own kids to program. According to the KPL Web site's Teacher's Introduction:
"KPL stands for Kid's Programming Language. KPL makes it easy for kids to learn computer programming. KPL makes it fun, too, by making it especially easy to program computer games, with cool graphics and sound. KPL is not just for games, though’Äîit can be used for teaching many different subjects. KPL's emphasis on games is based on the belief that learning is best when learning is fun.
"KPL is a freeware educational program developed by Morrison Schwartz, a software development and consulting company. KPL is also a growing community of teachers, students and parents from around the world who are learning and programming using KPL. KPL is still in its early stages, but already offers a number of sample programs as learning material, and we are working on much more."
Another Morrison Schwartz Web page summarizes the language:
"KPL's language is modeled on the simplicity and readability of BASIC, but it is a structured rather than linear programming language. KPL lets children see eye-catching and immediate results from their programs, while teaching them fundamental concepts like variables, data types, loops, decision structures, methods and functions. KPL's data types include integers, decimals, strings, booleans, arrays, and user-defined structures."
To my eye, the KPL language looks like a stripped-down version of the Visual Basic language with some elements of C#. The control structures lean towards Basic (If/Then/Else/End If, For/Next, While/End While, Method/End Method), and there are no semi-colons. The comments, on the other hand, lean towards the C style: //.
The language has data Structures, on the order of C structs, but not classes, and that's deliberate. The point is that object-oriented programming is not really appropriate for beginners.
** Read more at http://www.byte.com/documents/byt1128970353339/ **
PhL
-- oooo Dr. Serge Stinckwich OOOOOOOO Université de Caen>CNRS UMR 6072>GREYC>MAD OOESUGOO http://purl.org/net/SergeStinckwich oooooo Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)] \ / ##
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