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?

  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 months ago

    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.

    Um, yeah, they really don’t want you to be doing that. Creating the recovery disk was probably a waste of time and I recommend erasing the disk and doing something more useful with it (give it to your kid as a backup disk or something).

    Your Mac has “recovery mode” int he firmware, it will often boot into recovery automatically if there’s something wrong with your boot disk, or you can manually trigger it by holding down certain keys at boot time.

    Back on topic:

    I recommend teaching your kid how to develop “inside a container” with Visual Studio Code and Docker: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/containers

    It’s a bit of a steep learning curve - you’re going to have to learn it yourself and help him at first, but it will save your kid so much time in the long run and will allow more freedom to experiment and potentially mess things up. When you install software inside a container, and mess it up, you can restart from scratch (or even better, go back to how it was a few days ago) in a few seconds.

    I also recommend buying your kid a ChatGPT 4 subscription - so he can ask questions like this and get answers a thousand times faster than with a Google search:

    • Kache@lemm.ee
      0·
      7 months ago

      Disagree with Docker and git at this stage of learning. This is an 8yr old playing with scratch, Minecraft, and early levels of CodeAcademy.

      The answer to “not dealing with environment” isn’t Docker, it’s a programming(-esque) game or an in-browser environment.