I've been thinking about a couple of post for a while (...I agee, I don't think fast, but I'm persistant...) : Understanding the difficulties of raising a young perl coder... and Perl as a first language.

My oldest son is now 10 years old and I'm thinking of teaching him the noble art of programming. In Sweden where we live, children start learning English at the age of 10, so my son is just a beginner, which would give him a handicap if I were to teach him a programming language with English syntax. The only programmaing language I know of available in Swedish is Visual Basic :( but I would rather teach him perl.

To get around this problem, I thought of writing a perlfilter, that translated "Swedish" perl commands to English, like if you write "skriv" in your code, the perlfilter will translate that to "print". I've got a working prototype for this.

Now my question is this: Have any of you had experience with teaching young children to write code in other languages than English? If so, Have they had trouble "porting" themselves to English later?

Thanks for your time.

/brother t0mas

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