[Beach_Coder]

Perhaps I can piggyback on this question, but with a different goal. I've had this idea for a while (along with countless others that will never amount to anything) to develop not a new language but a subset of one.
The only one I have any practical knowledge of is VB.Net.
I would love to get my kids into programming, but unless the student has at least some enthusiasm it is difficult to overcome an attention span of a gnat.
Microsoft has their SmallBasic, which I hated, but the idea wasn't a bad one.
So, what if I wanted to create a development environment that was pre-configured, if you will, like VB Express, but stripped down, along with the language?
Maybe something like a pseudo development environment that ran VB Express in the background and just took care of all of the things that I wouldn't want the user to worry about or have access to.
It wouldn't have much capability but that would be by design. The benefit would be that the first-time programmer wouldn't need to worry about certain things (from basic matters such as trapping certain errors to the more complex things such as having to do an api call to hide the carot in a textbox or maximize the console window).
Maybe it is just as simple as creating an app with a happy interface that runs any given IDE in the background?

[ishkabible]

The steps still apply; maybe you could piggy back by taking parts of the front and backend of an existing language but the steps are still the same. If you take that route however It would be just as easy to add to the language as it would be to take things out(if not easier given that software is generally designed to be added to).

[jon.kiparsky]

I don't know anything at all about VB, but I think this might be complicated in most procedural languages. In compiled languages, you usually can't just pass an instruction through from the user to the machine (this should be obvious). So you can't just pass along a subset of the language. You'd really be designing and implementing a little language, which might happen to look like a simpler VB, or not.

I'm not especially convinced that your premise is a good one - if the kids aren't motivated, I tend to doubt that a simpler language will help. It's still going to be harder work than an unmotivated person will do. And if a kid is motivated, they have a lot better attention span than you can imagine. However, if this is something you want to do, I'd steer you towards scheme. I get the sense that it'll be easier to write a little language in a lisp than in any compiled language. You might also have some luck with javascript. I'm not a big js guru, but I expect you could write a restricted console in javascript that would give your kids access to some interesting and safe subset of the language.

Good luck with this. This is a problem a lot of people have worked on, with limited results, so if you come up with something you and your kids like you should tell someone about it.

[innuendoreplay]

Its very complicated, you need a lot of knowledge, but take the reference that when you need a language is because any of the currents languages can solve your problems/necessities; for instance, all the languages that persons or corporations create are for a founded reason. At first, if you want a compiled language is necessary that you learn assembly, c, c++.

[ishkabible]

I would partially disagree with that; assembly can meet EVERYONES needs but some things do the job better so true "need" is not really the right term. Also some(most?) languages are general purpose languages or sometimes just experiments so not all languages are created for a specific task. some are, like erlang which was invented to handle large scale distributed processing.

This post has been edited by ishkabible: 02 February 2012 - 05:14 PM