What Language To Teach A Child
That'd be programming language, not verbal.
Talk about a confluence of ideas! I'd been thinking about this on and off for a while since Julian was born and up pops a post by Joshua Allen talking about a post by Don Box.
I too had been thinking along the lines of a declarative/functional (e.g. lisp/ml/hope/smalltalk) rather than imperative (e.g. C++, C#, Basic) language for the very reasons that it requires reasoning, planning and design - but most of all thought. (Quick recap, my dissertation was the unification of a functional, lambda calculus style language with a prolog system).
I'll add another one to the mix: ML. I like ML's mathematical look'n'feel, but without the obtuseness of something like lisp. Maybe it'd be Hope, which I did a lot of work with at college.
Anyhow, should be fun. At the moment I can't stop him throwing lego blocks at the dog. Stopping him dereferencing null pointers might be easier.
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Do you remember Logo? It was popular in my school in the early 80's. I think that's a great one for a kid.
Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. Yes I thought about Logo, but didn't remember too much about it other than it was mainly used to drive turtle graphics. I believe it was also a very imperative language. I need to go check it out ;-)