As everyone interacts with their families over the holidays many of you might have younger folks who are interested in learning about programming. So I thought I'd share something I found that is really good for helping beginners of all ages, and without the kind of "toy" feel of languages like Scratch which I've heard anecdotally turns off even kids.<p>Earlier this year I started a class teaching architects comuptational design. The goal was to get them using Grasshopper [1]. However - although gh is a real programming language, it isn't good for introducing the fundamental concepts of programming logic. (It doesn't natively expose loops and there's a big learning curve to setting up conditionals, etc.)<p>So I wanted to teach fundamental concepts using flow charts and went looking for a program better than Visio for this. Of course I started with Drakon[2]. It's fine but I found that it was a little too easy to do things that weren't constrained enough, which you need with early learners. Amazingly I found one better - the program Flowgorithm[3], which allows you to program using flow charts directly. And it has a neat feature that will convert the logic into textual code of 18+ programming languages.<p>While of course it's hard for the programs to be much beyond trivial, it turned out to be an EXCELLENT way to connect developing a procedural mindset to actual text code.<p>Since it's been a long time since it was on HN [a][b], and timely to everyone's breaks I wanted to share it here again. Enjoy, and good luck to the future hacker in your life!<p>[1] <a href="https://www.grasshopper3d.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.grasshopper3d.com/</a><p>[2] <a href="https://drakonhub.com/" rel="nofollow">https://drakonhub.com/</a><p>[3] <a href="http://www.flowgorithm.org/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.flowgorithm.org/index.html</a><p>[a]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834315">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10834315</a><p>[b]<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138283">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19138283</a>