I think, each programming language has its strengths and weaknesses. Or I should say some programming languages make solving certain tasks easier. So, if your son wants to learn graphics, you should probably introduce him to HTML / JavaScript! That is the easiest way to go. I think, you didn't mention what OS you use. Windows makes it super easy to create GUI programs written in HTML and JavaScript. Add .HTA extension to it, and you have a GUI application in a matter of minutes. Seriously, you want to make sure you don't complicate it too much lest he lose interest. Make it simple for him. And JavaScript is very simple! It's also very similar to Perl. In JavaScript, you can start variable names with a '$' sign just like in Perl. It has regex and substr() and there are a bunch of other very familiar things in JavaScript. So, it's not a big step in the opposite direction, I think. In Windows, you can write a GUI application that launches Perl scripts, which is pretty cool... (For similarities and differences between JavaScript and Perl, see this page I wrote: http://wzsn.net/perl/jsandperl.html)

Also, check out PureBasic. It's a paid software, yes, and it's expensive (about $70-80 to purchase), but it makes GUI programming very easy (not as simple as HTML & JavaScript, but still on the easy side), and it can compile to Windows, Linux and MacOS. It comes with an extensive Help file and lots of example programs to learn. And it's easy to learn. Okay, it's totally different from Perl, but it's not hard to learn at all. By the way, there is a Freeware version too. It's called XBasic. It also runs on Windows and Linux and makes graphics programming fun and easy!

In reply to Re: Advice on learning Perl and graphics by harangzsolt33
in thread Advice on learning Perl and graphics by Dr. Subtilis

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