I want to thank everyone for sharing their stories of their first language. That's really what this is about, to make that first experience easier and with the arduino also make it fun. Once they are hooked, have them migrate to a real language.
I'm wondering if anyone has a feature from their first language that they really liked or disliked, or if there is something about my language that you would like added or changed. This will be a slow process and I probably won't be able to please many people, but I would like to hear any and all requests so I can keep them in the back of my mind.
A couple things I can probably add right off the bat is "Else If" and nested "Ifs"
I know that goto is considered evil, but it is so easy to implement. I changed it to "jump" to avoid the negative connotations. At first I had a jump absolute and relative, but that was confusing so I added :Label and now the only jump is a jump to label. That's a little more self-documenting.
Added 7SegmentInit and 7SegmentValue keywords to language. This allows a user to associate a single 7segment display to 7 digital outputs and write values to the 7 segment display. I updated the github repository listed above. I also update the SevenSegment library found on this site as it had some issues.
Actually, I agree with everyone here. Paulware has a really good idea for bringing in the young to the blinking lights to music realm, as does bitlash. But, the need for a lower level mess with the bits and registers language is necessary to do some of the things we want to do from time to time.
And, I can't see anything wrong with all of them existing and being available to choose from.
CrossRoads has a really good point about encouraging new engineers. But being able to sequence the lights on Mom's Christmas tree could be a good starting point to learn about one wire control for next years outside trees. My experience has been (yours is certainly different), when a teenager has to learn about libraries, objects, inheritance, etc. before they can tell the first light to shut off and turn on the second, they loose interest and go grab the video game control.
And Nick is absolutely correct in that simple things the current IDE is pretty much as simple as basic, however when you step it up just a little, you get into controls with all their complexity and obtuse language standards that will scare the kids away pretty quickly. Just imagine how odd a parsing routine that takes a user's typed input and does something with it (other than a simple menu, play fair) would look to a 13 year old that can use a rocket launcher to blow away a classmate on his xbox.
I'm all for complexity and bitwise manipulation of data streams as well as sliding abstract blocks of functions around a screen.
I just had a conversation with someone Friday that brought this home again to me. This person was fairly far advanced in engineering, making his own pcbs, and soldering smd parts. But, language skill wise he was still at C level and had never made the transition to objects. So I guess the point is people are at all sorts of different skill levels. Trying to make something easier for them so that they can innovate I think is worthwhile.
And about objects, as a friend was going over inheritance today I thought of a game that children could play that in the background is really teaching how to think in terms of object programming.
The idea is to have a "tree" of object and have the children build the "tree" from static cards. For example Vehicles might be the base-class which is at the top of the tree, motorized and wind driven vehicles could be down a level, cars/boats/planes/motorcycles could be down another level....etc. The object of the game is the organize and create the tree correctly. But really you are teaching object-oriented design, and that pattern of thinking.
