[erlang-questions] Erlang for youngsters

[José Valim]

>
> This thread would be much more interesting without all the *unproven
> conjectures* that Elixir is obviously the better choice to teach to
> children.
>
Peer, why not hold your e-mails to the same criteria you expect from the
whole thread? Btw, a conjecture is by definition unproven.

> I disagree.  *Elixir is a much worse choice to teach to children*,
> because its not a simple language anmore.
>
Conjecture.

> There have been several people teaching Prolog and also Erlang to
> children. So far there is no experience teaching Elixir to the same group.
>
Experience comes with time and trying. If nobody tries, we will never know.

Also if you are saying Elixir is "just Ruby" then why not count all the
initiatives that actually teach Ruby to children in its favor?

* http://ruby4kids.com/ruby4kids
* http://www.kidsruby.com

I have been to Ruby conferences where we had rooms full of children being
taught Ruby. Or should they all be considered the devil's work and the
teachers burned at the stake?

> Elixir is mainly appealing to either people comming from Ruby or just for
> pop culture value (as is Ruby itself).
>
Conjecture(s).

>  What advantage does metaprogramming have for teaching kids?
>
Yes, I bet the second chapter of a future "Elixir for Kids" book is about
meta-programming.

========

Note I am not saying at any point that Elixir is better or worse. I would
be glad to see people trying and kids playing with it.

I won't mind whatever language my kid chooses when learning to program,
I'll just be happy he's doing it. I got really interested in programming
with ActionScript because at the time I was playing with creating
animations in Macromedia Flash and then I found out I could really do a lot
of interesting stuff by using a programming language instead of relying on
the GUI. I didn't care if the language was functional, OO, the syntax it
used for defining functions, or whatever.

The worst we could do to future programmers is to actually ingrain the idea
there is one true solution in software.
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