With no particular intention of looking at something in particular, I was looking at a few blogs and came across KPL - Kid's Programming Language. An official website is hosted at www.kidsprogramminglanguage.com and MSDN has a few articles on KPL (owing to the fact that it is developed using C# - if you didn't know, MSDN has a section called coding4fun which has to do with Game Programming and stuff).

Now, KPL is pretty interesting. It is a language with editor and all, and is pretty simple. I am not quite sure how easy it would be for kids to work with, but I guess if somebody has the aptitude, they could pick it up pretty soon.

KPL revived some memories of my own younger days. I was in school when I first got introduced to programming. BASIC used to be the language for kids then and I got a hang of BASIC pretty soon. BASIC continued to be my favourite language for a long time and I worked with various BASIC interpreters - BASICA, Microsoft QBASIC and the others that shipped in floppy disks at that time.

I still think kids can learn a lot more with BASIC. I have met many kids and students of late who were born in the Windows era. They have absolutely no exposure to DOS - not that I blame them. But DOS was fun. BASIC was great fun - screen modes, sounds, animation and all.

I wish there was still a version of BASIC (not Visual Basic) floating around for the kids. KPL is probably attempting to take that place, but it is not quite BASIC, arguably the first PC computer language and the one Bill Gates himself coded in years ago.

UPDATE: Check this Channel 9 post on KPL: http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=166995