My brother would like to learn some programming to find out if he’d enjoy doing it. He’s 16 and doesn’t know much about computers in general and knows nothing about programming in particular.
I’m thinking about picking either Alice or Python. I see Think Python is the often recommended read, but isn’t it a bit too much (size-wise) for a beginner? It’s certainly not too complicated, but I’m not that optimistic about my brother… 🙂 Anything else he could try that would be smaller and VERY simple?
Also, has anyone had any experience with Alice? I myself wouldn’t really want to start programming this way, but I can see why the visual aspect might be more attractive to certain people. I’m just not sure how limiting it is and if the time used learning the pseudo language wouldn’t be better spent learning a real one.
EDIT: Thank you for your replies. I guess we’ll go with Python. However, as I mentioned above, isn’t “Think Python” a bit too extensive for a complete “newbie”? Any other, but simpler Python programming introductions you could recommend?
The advantage of Python is that – should he be bitten by the bug – there’s massive a community and lots of resources to drawn on and explore.
If he’s not bitten by Python, then programming might be a hard sell anyway, so I don’t see the advantage of starting on logo-likes, even 3D ones like Alice. Alice can of course be fun, as can writing Lua scripts to extend a mainstream game title. But all the hardcore programmers in their thirties now seem to have started on Turbo Pascal or even assembler when they were around 16, and Python offers an approachable modern-day equiv.