I would start with something that the students can see tangible results 
of immediately. SuperCollider is heavily based on SmallTalk, so it has 
all the meant-for-teaching OO goodness, but then you hit a key and sound 
comes out. Pure Data might also be good, it's a graphical MUSIC V 
language, which would help them visualize the program flow, plus you get 
audio results immediately. But Pd might not be as communicable to other 
languages, as they advance.

On the other hand a scripting language like SH (or maybe Perl or Python) 
might be a good foot in the door, where you can teach basic concepts, 
without having to gloss over more complex ones for the sake of simplicity.

I guess the direction I'm headed in with all this is that a compiled 
language will just add a layer of complexity, which is the last thing 
you need. And BASIC is an outdated morass that should be avoided at all 
costs. Bringing up children on BASIC is like bringing up children on 
crack. If you just sort of introduced them to the UNIX shell they would 
get some useful skills and an introduction to a meta-language that would 
be very helpful as they move on, but it's not really a programming 
language, so maybe no.

Cheers,
Ian

William Chops Westfield wrote:
> So what does one use for teaching basic programming to kids these days.
> (pre-algebraic 5th graders, to be specific.)  I haven't heard anything
> about LOGO in a long time, and Pascal seems a bit dated and uncommon.
> Java?  Are there any good java books and/or environments aimed at kids
> this age?
> 
> BillW
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