Primer

To support our long-term goal, we're developing Primer, a novel pedagogical programming language.

Design principles

Primer has been designed exclusively for educational purposes:

• It's first and foremost a teaching langauge, not a general purpose programming language. Educational goals have been prioritized over performance and real-world applicability. That said, because Primer focuses on teaching fundamental aspects of programming and computation, we believe that Primer students will be well prepared for learning real-world programming languages, especially strongly-typed modern programming languages such as Haskell, Rust, and TypeScript.
• It's designed to be embedded into interactive applications and games, in order to motivate children to learn to program by applying programming to other, potentially more interesting activities.
• Primer is a modern functional programming language, featuring a strong type system that helps students write correct programs.
• Structure editing is built into the language's semantics, supporting both visual and text-based programming, with the ability to switch between the two representations with equal fidelity.
• Primer is designed to work well with touch-based human interfaces. Very little keyboarding is required.
• Primer runs entirely in a web browser. It doesn't require a computer and can run comfortably on Android and iOS tablets. No server or cloud service is required to read, write, or run programs in Primer.
• Primer was designed to be independent of any particular human language, with the goal of making it accessible to children around the world.

Availability

Primer is currently in development. It is licensed as open source software, and is free for anyone to use, modify, and redistribute. The source code for Primer is available on GitHub.

Primer is not yet ready for serious classroom use, but we hope to launch a preview version for testing in the near future. And of course, because Primer is open source software, anyone can download it and try themselves.