Karel

From APIDesign

Karel is a programming language for children which I learned being thirteen and participated in few contests. Its simplicity is its biggest strength. In order to do anything complex you have to learn what recursion is. As a result learning Karel early turns people in functional programming lovers (either really practicing it or just dreaming about it like me) which will be more and more useful in future to effectively deal with multi core programming.

Btw. there is also Karel built on top of NetBeans platform: http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/karelnb/

The history of mankind is repeating. In circles. Yet, according to Karl Marx it is repeating in spiral - the new generations are about to do the same mistakes as the previous ones, just on new (hopefully) higher level. A bit too optimistic conclusion, but as far as JavaScript goes, probably true.

I learned programming while coding in the Karel language. But it felt not like a real programming language, Karel was a programming language for children. Still, everything I ever learned about programming I owe to Karel. Those who know the two sides essay by Dijkstra can imagine what was my computer to execute my programs. Yes, I was simulating all the computations in hand. How does a computer of young generation looks like? Right, it is a browser. And JavaScript runs naturally in a browser. What kind of impact this can have on like-to-be-programers?