Hi all,
A fair while ago I asked the community here advice as my 8yo lad wanted to experiment with programming: Old Post.
Thanks so much for all the words of wisdom - there’s still stuff we can explore in the replies.
Thought I’d just give a little update.
So I installed dual boot Linux Mint / OSX on an old intel MacBook Air (dual boot in case his homework/school stuff needs it, but he hasn’t used OSX much!).
It was much easier than I thought it’d be. Perhaps it’s just the hardware/OS choice, but I don’t consider myself to be ‘properly’ technical and it was a breeze. Perhaps the only difficult part was creating a bootable OSX restore disk just in case I destroyed the OS… it’s almost like Mac really don’t want you to be doing this.
He’s working his way through foundational courses on programming, in codeacademy, and using scratch as usual. So far, so good.
Is there an IDE you’d recommend that has some element of a tutorial to it?
For IDE, VSCode is the usual recommendation. Some of the plugins really help making code readable and digestible.
You can’t go wrong with Visual Studio Code (AKA VSCode). It’s easy to pick up on, there are some pretty neat extensions and it works for seveal languages.
However there are IDEs specific to some languages, like PyCharm for python. While they usually have some cool features, your child will probably not need to use them.
Good luck :)
I wanted to mention VSCodium as an alternative to VSCode, from their website “VSCodium is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VS Code.”
Basically it just removes telemetry/tracking.
Neovim and language servers tbh
Vscode and vscodium have already been recommended.
Its not an ide by itself. Its a highly extensible text editor, and its very mainstream. The extensions can turn it into an IDE. And there is a huge community around it.
Its worth searching for things like “vscode recommended python extensions” and making sure they make sense, then installing them via the vscode extensions.
You can have different extensions for different workspaces. So you can have a web workspace, a python workspace, a platformio workspace etc.
I use vscode as my main editor/ide
