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Ask HN: How should a 7th grade girl learn to program iPod/iPhone apps?

2 points by sprintf ↗ HN
Back in my day, I learned how to program with HyperCard on the Mac. It allowed making GUIs right away, had plenty of books, and was a self-contained environment (not the mess that is HTML/CSS/JS).

Now, a family friend's 12 year old daughter is curious about making iPod/iPhone apps and I'm wondering what is the right language/platform/environment for this era. Suggestions?

Some people recommended Greenfoot and Invent with Python, but I'm looking for something that can produce results on a device she's already using. (Because I remember trying to learn programming in an alien environment and I found it really discouraging when I was a kid. In my day, that was trying to learn console text-mode programming when I was a Mac GUI user. Present-day Me thinks it makes sense to learn the basics in text-mode on a PC first, but Kid Me is not convinced.)

3 comments

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arkades
The language for iPhone is Objective C. This is a pretty popular tutorial package for it: http://www.raywenderlich.com/store/ios-apprentice

I'm only a fledgeling programmer myself, so my comment should be taken with a grain of salt, but I suspect ObjC might be a bit much to start with for a 12 year old. I tried and failed to take up programming a few times before I finally tried python and it stuck. Then again, that's just me.

sprintf
Right, I think ObjC is too much for a 12 year old with no programming experience. (Frankly, IMO, anything with manual memory management is probably too much.) So I'm curious if HN'ers suggest other ways to get something going without writing it in ObjC.