That's kind-of sad to hear. I picked up programming when I was 8 on QBASIC, and absolutely loved it. 8-year old me would stay late nights till 3 a.m. programming.
I have to admit, Microsoft got a lot of stuff right with the QBasic that was bundled with MS-DOS. Hitting F1 would bring up an amazing help system that documented various features of the language with code snippets. I remember discovering the "DRAW" command, and how much fun I had with it. I came across it on the documentation; and the code snippet is what made it really easy to learn how to use it. But the doc was well-written too -- sufficiently simple for an 8-year-old whose native language is not English, to understand.
Now imagine that I had some *nix -- vi/emaccs alone would put me off, erm, any text editing, not to mention programming. Also, just the way Unix is, where things often break silently, and the system assumes you know what you're doing -- just isn't suited to an 8-year old.
I'm kind-of disappointed at the state of programming right now. Many of the popular languages of today -- JS, Java, Obj-C, C++, etc. are no where as simple as the BASIC dialects are. Python though, is actually a good candidate. With a nice Turtle-like library, it would be a perfect beginner's intro language to programming!
You should try DrRacket. The book "How to design programs" uses it to get you straight into simple graphics. Both the book and DrRacket are available for free as in beer and speech online.
I have to admit, Microsoft got a lot of stuff right with the QBasic that was bundled with MS-DOS. Hitting F1 would bring up an amazing help system that documented various features of the language with code snippets. I remember discovering the "DRAW" command, and how much fun I had with it. I came across it on the documentation; and the code snippet is what made it really easy to learn how to use it. But the doc was well-written too -- sufficiently simple for an 8-year-old whose native language is not English, to understand.
Now imagine that I had some *nix -- vi/emaccs alone would put me off, erm, any text editing, not to mention programming. Also, just the way Unix is, where things often break silently, and the system assumes you know what you're doing -- just isn't suited to an 8-year old.
I'm kind-of disappointed at the state of programming right now. Many of the popular languages of today -- JS, Java, Obj-C, C++, etc. are no where as simple as the BASIC dialects are. Python though, is actually a good candidate. With a nice Turtle-like library, it would be a perfect beginner's intro language to programming!