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Andrew Starks wrote:
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 8:46 AM, Dirk Laurie<dirk.laurie@gmail.com> wrote:2013/3/25 marbux<marbux@gmail.com>:
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The reason I am asking is that about a week ago I met an 8-year-old girl named Hunter whose obvious brilliance very simply rocked me on my heels. (I'm going on 67 years old and this was the first time I'd had such an experience.) She has no computer. So with her mother's permission I am buying her a used laptop. I'd like to equip the laptop with that programming language's interpreter and its tutorials.
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I think that as a *language*, Lua is perfect. It lacks what Love provides, which is some early, entertaining feedback. If you wanted to, and could, start with something even more direct, then Lego Mindstorms is pretty awesome that way, too.
As the author of pbLua for LEGO MINDSTORMS, I have the somewhat biased view that Lua on MINDSTORMS is a fun way to learn programming.
This is mainly because you learn to debug by observing (physically) how your program is not working, which forces you to "play computer" and figure out why it's not doing what you expect - it is, of course doing exactly what you told it to do :-)
Love is also good for the same reasons, plus you don't need to buy a MINDSTORMS kit.
By the way, the new MINDSTORMS EV3 (due out in late summer) runs Linux on an ARM9 device - and will be substantially more capable than the little SAM7 device the MINDSTORMS NXT runs now.
Cheers, Ralph