> She found it very frustrating [...] I wonder if I should try a [different language] with her
Or, perhaps, preprocess left-arrow to equal?
Customizing a language to taste. Especially for shallow syntactic issues. Like "no multi-line string literals allowed ... I'm sorry, that's just not ok". Or "ok kid, what nicknames would you like to give the keywords today"?
When programming for just fun, I'll sometimes go "this aspect of the language bugs me - I could of course just live with it... but here, I think it will be more fun not to". So for recent example, a few lines of recast.js ast tweaking, and I could use infix unicode mathematical symbols as javascript functions.
I wonder if one could teach programming by build-your-own language. Perhaps even of the video-scanned desktop variety. "Draw a circle around your toys to create a collection. Label it with a letter. Now you can sort/filter it by..."
Or, perhaps, preprocess left-arrow to equal?
Customizing a language to taste. Especially for shallow syntactic issues. Like "no multi-line string literals allowed ... I'm sorry, that's just not ok". Or "ok kid, what nicknames would you like to give the keywords today"?
When programming for just fun, I'll sometimes go "this aspect of the language bugs me - I could of course just live with it... but here, I think it will be more fun not to". So for recent example, a few lines of recast.js ast tweaking, and I could use infix unicode mathematical symbols as javascript functions.
I wonder if one could teach programming by build-your-own language. Perhaps even of the video-scanned desktop variety. "Draw a circle around your toys to create a collection. Label it with a letter. Now you can sort/filter it by..."