Thinking on the ‘what to teach eldest’, I went back to the first principles. Many of those reading learnt BASIC first because it was the core building block to the machines we were using. It wasn’t the one professionals used; that would be the variants of assembly aka machine code. Machine code always blew my brain as an 8 year old, it made no sense. Admittedly neither did the higher data or algorithm requirements I had of BASIC. Sorting a football table by points obtained as the bane of my existence in my first life as a programmer. I could never quite get it right.
So looking around at various languages etc to teach, the answer is obvious. Teach HTML5/JavaScript. The Internet is the computer now, not the piece of hardware in front. The Internet as displayed on a tablet.
Thus I was surprised (given my history of not using Microsoft tools due to their expense) to see the MIT licensed Microsoft/Atari hook up. The Atari SDK looks very nice ( http://atari.com/arcade/developers/building-html5-games-atari-arcade ). I’m not interested in publishing into the arcade, but as a tool to write games at home in JavaScript, it looks excellent.
So move aside Squeak, Greenfoot etc, Atari is the goal 
