Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "Scratch? Python? C? Kernighan on Languages for Kids Coding - Computerphile" video.

I bought a Mindstorms kit, but I never used any of the proprietary software. I found the open-source NBC/NXC compiler, and built my code with that. I also wrote some of my own tools (in Python) to encode/decode the custom sound and graphics formats.
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Those who remember BASIC also remember the immediacy of being able to type a statement and have it executed right away, versus sticking a line number in front of it to add it to the in-memory program. That was very convenient for experimenting, and for developing a program incrementally. You can do something analogous, I would say nicer, with Jupyter. You can type any number of lines of code (in Python or other supported languages) in a cell, and execute that cell with shift-enter. And so you can incrementally build up your code across multiple cells. And there is never a need to do the equivalent of a SAVE command, because the notebook system is regularly autosaving for you.
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Check out the o
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ld classic book Mindstorms by Seymour Papert, first published in 1980. This goes into the rationale behind the LOGO programming language, and is full of examples of the fun that kids could have learning to program.
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Back then, BASIC was the go-to language for budding hackers with their newfangled home computers, but LOGO had list processing, like LIS
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P! And of course turtle graphics. It was also a clever way to introduce mathematical concepts that some might consider too “advanced” for such young children. For example, drawing a circle as a polygon with lots of sides, something like (can’t remember the exact LOGO syntax): to circle : repeat 360 : forward a small step turn right one degree and you are in fact getting close to the differential-geometry representation of a circle. *Trying to avoid triggering the YouTube autocensorbot, which behaves particularly oddly on this channel
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