Whilst thinking over the weekend about how kids/beginners would learn to program in a fun, simple environment, I stumbled across Microsoft Small Basic. There are an overwhelming number of possible avenues into programming, and Microsoft have done a pretty decent job of providing a way for beginners to experiment and understand what programming is. The IDE is pretty simple as you’d expect, but it does have some nice features like intellisense and links into the community website for sharing/importing code.

Playing with the package for a bit made me nostalgic for AMOS Basic, which is what I spent much of childhood tinkering with 🙂