12 year old son wants to learn programming

[Markbnj]

The C++ Destructor pattern has a certain level of elegance to it. You reliably know that when the object is moved out of scope or destroyed, the connection is closed. That is a big win IMO. All the sudden, a properly written object handles both memory management AND resource management. Something no other GC language can really claim.

No argument from me there. Garbage collectors are designed to manage memory, not generalized to the point where they can handle any resource acquisition scenario. For a language to be truly object-oriented I think it has to feature support for the object lifecycle, at least creation and destruction. C++'s constructor/destructor paradigm was one of the real revelations for me when I first started using it in my migration from C and procedural Pascal. In C# you have to implement an interface and either call a method explicitly or place the reference within a using block. Python 3 adds support for enter and exit methods called on an object referenced with the 'with' statement. These are mostly rather clunky approaches to me. C++ had and has the most elegant implementation of the object lifecycle that I have used personally.

 

[SearchMaster]

I agree with the suggestions for Java - it will allow him to create apps for just about any platform, including Android.

 

[Dravic]

Depends on what he (thinks he) wants to do.

I was about 11 when i first learned BASIC, learned PASCAL, C and C++ in school.

I went the Unix Admin -> Security Engineer route so I have less need for the low level languages, and a high need for the DRY languages like Python. For me Python replaced Perl during the Linux datacenter takeover.


I mostly create Dashboards, API's, and tie other tools together these days. Python is great for this. It also is the language of my favorite web framework (Django).

Either way I wouldn't waste his or your time with the kiddy glove learn to program stuff.. If he wants to code, teach him how to code.

either way.. remember syntax's come and go, its the logic and advances in programming that will remain.

 

[serpretetsky]

When I was 14 I was programming on my ti calculator. I tried to learn c++ but i just didn't care enough to get it. Libraries? I need a character array to store someone's name? Pointers? what is all this junk? It really slowed me down and made me depresed about programming. I guess I was slower then others. Went back to my ti calculator and continued programming on that instead

Today I'm a computer science student and i love c++.