Louisville, KY
Greg is a retired neurologist in Louisville, Kentucky, with a long-standing interest in computers and programming, beginning with Fortran IV in the 1960s. When Linux and open source software came along, it kindled a commitment to learning more, and eventually contributing. He is a member of the Scribus Team.
Authored Comments
I use KDE, and when I highlight some text, then press Delete, I want it deleted, not placed in the Clipboard. I use Ctrl-X if I want it there. I don't see any setting for that. It's annoying to Delete, then pull up the Clipboard and delete again.
Incidentally, most of the time, if you want to Copy, Paste, and Cut, you use Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, and Ctrl-X respectively. If you're working in Bash at the command line, the shortcuts are Shift-Ctrl-C, Shift-Ctrl-V, and Shift-Ctrl-X respectively.
To echo Marco somewhat, you should first consider what sorts of programming tasks kids will both understand and be interested in pursuing on their own.
As far as language, I would tend to favor Perl or Python. Perl has some tighter syntax rules, which actually is better since it can make debugging easy. Python is a bit looser (for example, variable naming rules and absence of any character to end a line with).
I think especially important for kids is to early on show a lot of examples of bad syntax, with associated error messages. Sometimes the error messages from the compiler are less than obvious about what is wrong or what to look for in the broken script.