I have been searching for efficient language/platform to help ease the pain of learning programming. For past several years, I decided Java is the Language/platform. It's very capable to doing graphics. There are many great free IDEs such as Eclipse and Netbeans, for writing programs. A couple of week ago, I found a better one.
Khan Academy is offering computer programming lessons now. They provide a web page for interactive programming, besides many tutorial video of programming examples. The Language they have chosen is Proccessing. I played around a while and love it.
The code on the left figure generates the shapes on th right. If you click a number in you code, a sliding bar appears on top of it. By dragging the sliding bar, the shape will move/deform with you. I encourage that all beginner and veteran programmers should try it out. I have coded several examples and everyone is welcome to play with them and freely copy them: pi-computation, numerical-integration, root-finding-newtons-method.
After many years of programming in several languages for scientific purposes, I always find it hard to program a simple computer game in any environment. Now with this web based Processing environment, I programmed a simple game: angry-monkey. I am thrilled! I think every game loving teenage (and teenage within) should start to do game programming now!
