On Thursday, 29 January 2015 09:13:07 UTC, Dave Liquorice wrote:
On 28 Jan 2015 22:19:59 GMT, Huge wrote:

Boy1 ...
... (13) is interested in learning how to write code ...

Code to do what? Writing a game that is much above Pong or Breakout
takes a lot of effort. "Hello World" gets boring after a while. There
has to be an itch that needs to scratched.

I believe Scratch games can be quite fun. (They're not going to sell,
but they can be entertaining if you wrote them.)

I'd go for Python.

Hum, personally I'm not keen on Python, it relies on correct and non
mixed (tab/space) indentation to run

Just set your editor to insert spaces when you press the tab key. Tab
characters in source files are the spawn of satan.

and when it doesn't it doesn't,
in my experience, tell you that it's upset about the indentation, it
just weird things (cause code is being run in an unexpected order) or
falls over with an error "that can't happen", except when the code is
running in an unexpected order.

I find Python easy to read and write, and (more to the point) my son
found it fairly easy to pick up at 16.


I'd avoid any of the "teaching" languages, why learn something that
isn't used in the real world?

Never did me much harm. I really started on BCPL (with some FORTRAN,
Algol68C, and BASIC thrown in too.)

It might give a grounding in the basic
way that code is structured but you can get that from any more main
stream languages with a decent "Beginers Guide to ..." book or online
tutorial.

The advantage of a teaching language are that you can get going more
quickly. I don't see the need to switch to a different language later
as a downside - programmers *need* to be able to switch.