I have found that antirez’ LOAD81 can be a rejuvenating and invigorating environment to give to kids and the elderly, alike, to inspire them to rekindle their love of programming:
It has all the bells and whistles of a BASIC environment - easy, simple editing, fast switching between code and runtime, and just enough of an onboard SDK to do hires graphics and so on .. but with the Lua language, instead of BASIC.
Maybe your little brother will get a kick out of this .. keep an eye for some of the forks of it too, which provide other functionality such as joystick and sound support .. sooner or later, someone will bolt on networking and maybe even REDIS support, and we’ll have a whole new era of simple Lua-based client programming on our doorstep.
https://github.com/antirez/LOAD81
It has all the bells and whistles of a BASIC environment - easy, simple editing, fast switching between code and runtime, and just enough of an onboard SDK to do hires graphics and so on .. but with the Lua language, instead of BASIC.
Maybe your little brother will get a kick out of this .. keep an eye for some of the forks of it too, which provide other functionality such as joystick and sound support .. sooner or later, someone will bolt on networking and maybe even REDIS support, and we’ll have a whole new era of simple Lua-based client programming on our doorstep.