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• Thursday, September 14, 2006 09:00 AM

  But there is a programming language for children

  Smalltalk was invented by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. It's a fantastic language for education as it uses the object-oriented approach to programming - everything is an object and responds to messages. It's very similar to the way the real world works - we're surrounded by objects that have attributes and we interact with them through the equivalent of messages (we 'talk' to a friend, 'open' a door and so on). It's graphical, programs don't need to be compiled and beat of all - rock-steady.

  From a very early stage, children were brought into the labs and given Smalltalk as their first programming experience - they love it. Without the preconceptions we have as grown programmers they take to it like ducks to water. The same is true of adults who've never programmed, I was part of the Open University's team that taught Smalltalk to over 4000 students a year. With almost no exceptions give someone Smalltalk and they can program.

  Whilst die-hard programmers can always use industrial strength Smalltalk-80; there is hope for everyone. Alan Kay went away to Disney of all companies and built a new version of Smalltalk called Squeak. It's attractive, powerful, portable and comes with loads of interactive toys designed to encourage the exploration of the language. When you get bored of those, it's pure Smalltalk under the hood.

  Oh and its free.

  http://www.squeak.org/

  —iCowboy
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