He is very interested in Minecraft and this thread will later have some questions about a PC build but I decided to delay that as sometime within the foreseeable future I may be able to responsibly afford a better than budget build.

Yeah, putting nostalgia aside I really don't see a reason to delve into retro-computing. Is python and/or java approachable for the older less flexible mind? I still have interests in programming but recognize I am less able to learn multiple complicated things in concert. I am taking the summer off to decompress a bit but will continue with my studies soon so I don't want to have delusions when it comes to getting into programming myself.

For an adult I'd recommend MIT opencourseware

Lisp

I lol'd.

Have you heard much about Racket, Jon? It seems to have been designed with education in mind. It's an offshoot of Scheme, but you don't have to use Scheme per se--instead you usually choose a specialized language, often paired with a tutorial / online book. Stuff like drawing shapes directly on the REPL in a line or two of code is super easy.

I couldn't get too much into it since it seemed too easy to feel like I was doing anything worthwhile, but it's probably something a kid could get a lot out of.

what does racket offer that clojure doesn't?

serious question, because people use clojure to do actual work, and selling a PL as being 'for education' puts it in a very meh camp

People often tell us that they wish to learn how to program and then they ask which programing language they should learn (first). Given the press that some programming languages get, this question is not surprising. But it is also inappropriate.

As the preceding sections explain, learning to program well is primarily about studying principles of design. The ideal programming language must support these principles and its implementation must explain all the mistakes novices make in terms that they understand. Our research shows that no off-the-shelf industrial language satisfies the second constraint. Their creators expect that the programmers immediately know the entire language because they have professional programmers in mind who roughly understand the fundamental concepts of languages.

Our solution is to use our own, incredibly small, teaching language, dubbed *SL in this preface. The language is the language function definitions, function applications, and nested, potentially conditional expressions. In essence, it is the foreign language that students in pre-algebra courses acquire. The difference is that our language comes with many more kinds of data than algebra—in addition to numbers, its basic data includes images and words. The language also comes with a number of pre-defined functions that make working in “pre-algebra” fun and entertaining; the very first program is a small animation.

When it comes to programming environments, we face an equally bad choice. A programming environment for professionals is the rough analogue of the cockpit of a jumbo jet. It has numerous controls and displays, overwhelming anyone who first launches such a software application. Novice programmers need the equivalent of a two-seat, single-engine propeller aircraft with which they can practice basic skills. We have therefore created DrRacket, a programming environment for novice programmers.

DrRacket consists of two simple panes: a Definitions area, where you define functions, and an Interactions area, where you interact with them. Even when there is nothing in the Definitions area, you can immediately experiment with expressions in the Interactions area. Thus, experimenting starts with pocket-calculator arithmetic, and it proceeds from there to calculations with images, words, lists, and other forms of data. This way, learning is closely supported by a highly playful, feedback-oriented support system.

An interactive evaluator simplifies the programming language and the learning process. Concretely, DrRacket has two advantages over conventional programming environments. First, it enables novice programmers to manipulate data directly. Hence the language does not need facilities for reading input and writing output, and novices don’t need to spend valuable time on figuring out how these work. Second, the arrangement strictly separates data and data manipulation from input and output of information. Nowadays this separation is considered so fundamental to the construction of software that it has its own name: called model-view-controller architecture. In short, working in DrRacket ensures that you pick up fundamental software engineering ideas in a natural way.

Racket isn't special for that. Lisp has always been very good at implementing DSLs and alternative semantics. Lisp was originally intended to have a more sophisticated grammar using so called M-expressions, which the language would internally translate into S-expressions. There wouldn't be (and ultimately isn't) anything stopping you from defining yet another alternative syntax.

So I've had a variety of topics that I'd wanted to discuss with those of us still remaining here so I'm just going to use this thread for that purpose.

The first thing I'd like to bring up is retro-computing and kids. Growing up in the 80s I have a huge nostalgic connection with old computers and from time to time I find myself following various topics down the internet rabbit hole. What I would like is your opinion on is there any value to these old computers as a means to introducing my son (9 years old) to programming and basic principles and if not what would be the best way to do so?

When I was a kid I was getting very proficient with BASIC but never moved past that just due to other interests and circumstances. I want to encourage my son to be more than just a user and delve into actually creating things on a computer. How would you suggest I facilitate that keeping in mind that I don't really have the ability to teach that myself anymore?

Look up computercraft for minecraft. In it, you can create programs on little computers using LUA. We experimented with it a bit at the college I work at, for a learning day for kids, using minecraft. You can also look up the raspberry pi Kano Kit, which has an OS with programs geared towards teaching kids how to program.

I'd advise against BASIC if you don't also include a C like language.

Please explain.