I think that there's huge value in starting with something very simple and as "raw", if you will, as possible. Any one of the various small 8 bit processors out there are very easy to understand. You have a few registers, interrupts, a small amount of RAM, perhaps some Flash, serial ports, etc. Simple.
The idea here is to really get down to the basics and understand them with a series of incremental projects.
Of course, there are no universally true rules about this stuff. This happens to be my opinion based on over quite of few years of developing and shipping products that entail both electronics and software.
As an example, I am teaching my own son how to program with C and Java almost simultaneously. Why? Well, he is not learning on his own, his Dad happens to knows this stuff pretty well and we are spending a lot of time on all of it. So, navigating two languages at the same time is working out OK. I've also had him sit with me while I work in Objective-C and ask questions as I go along.
In about three months we are going to build a real physical alarm clock using a small microprocessor and LED displays. I am going to to bootstrap Forth on that processor. The job will also require writing a simple screen text editor in order to make the clock its own development system.
So, by the middle of next year he will have been exposed to raw C, Java and a threaded interpreted language like Forth. I want to expose him to Lisp as well but don't yet know when it will make sense to do that. Maybe in a year or so. With three programming paradigms on the table it will be far more important to explore algorithms and data structures/data representation and understand how they look like with each technology.
The idea here is to really get down to the basics and understand them with a series of incremental projects.
Of course, there are no universally true rules about this stuff. This happens to be my opinion based on over quite of few years of developing and shipping products that entail both electronics and software.
As an example, I am teaching my own son how to program with C and Java almost simultaneously. Why? Well, he is not learning on his own, his Dad happens to knows this stuff pretty well and we are spending a lot of time on all of it. So, navigating two languages at the same time is working out OK. I've also had him sit with me while I work in Objective-C and ask questions as I go along.
In about three months we are going to build a real physical alarm clock using a small microprocessor and LED displays. I am going to to bootstrap Forth on that processor. The job will also require writing a simple screen text editor in order to make the clock its own development system.
So, by the middle of next year he will have been exposed to raw C, Java and a threaded interpreted language like Forth. I want to expose him to Lisp as well but don't yet know when it will make sense to do that. Maybe in a year or so. With three programming paradigms on the table it will be far more important to explore algorithms and data structures/data representation and understand how they look like with each technology.