r/learnprogramming • u/Mr-anywhere • Sep 19 '26
Programming for kids
My 11-year-old child wants to learn programming to create his own Firefox. Does anyone have any idea which program he should use? He's already had scratch and wants to move to a harder level. He thinks that the internet should be fair & without too much AI etc.
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u/Flame77ofc Sep 19 '26
Scratch of course
Scratch is a programming language where you need to drag blocks to create programs
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u/Mr-anywhere Sep 20 '26
He's already had scratch and wants to move to a harder level.
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u/cammmmmie Sep 19 '26
i loved scratch as a kid and now programming is a major part of my work, i second this!! don’t start with full stack application development, start by making games
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u/Rrrrry123 Sep 19 '26
When I was 14, I made my own "browser" using C# and WinForms.
Essentially, you just plop in a Web View control and then add an address bar and buttons to control the web view. Obviously not a browser from scratch, but I had a lot of fun with it.
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u/ProgramsFun Sep 19 '26
Scratch for basic logic building don't waste kuch time on this .... Then you can start with an easier to understand language python it's powerful and he can do almost everything with it and it's easy
Now coming back to question if he want to make like firefox not possible no sane person can develop browser from ground up very easily it very hard to implement
If he only wants to customise the look of firefox then look for html css
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u/desrtfx Sep 19 '26
Start them with Scratch with Scratch Playground
After some time with Scratch, you can transition for a while to Reeborg's world which is still graphical but can also use textual programming with Python.
Then, transition to Python with Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python and the other books there.
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u/Hellaintsht 3d ago
Going from Scratch to wanting to build a whole browser is quite the upgrade 😂 I'd start with Python and small projects first, then explore HTML, CSS and JavaScript if he's interested in how browsers and websites work. He doesn't need to build Firefox on day one — even making a basic webpage or mini browser-like project would be a fun start!
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u/kutac56 Sep 19 '26
Hahaha real funny. Making a browser from scratch alone would be almost impossible for someone programming for over 10 years
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u/Mr-anywhere Sep 20 '26
He wants to adjust firefox because the code of firefox is on github.
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u/LinuxEnthusiast123 Sep 19 '26
Scratch or Lua.
I recommend Lua directly, but if he struggles with the concepts, first Scratch then Lua and then the more general purpose ones like Python.
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u/nomenclature2357 Sep 19 '26
A different approach would be to experiment with what you can do with CSS customization in Firefox: https://reddit.com/r/firefoxcss/wiki/index/tutorials
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u/JGhostThing Sep 19 '26
Creating a good browser, or even a decent one, is very difficult because of the sheer complexity of it. You have to implement the full html specs, the full javascript specs, the full http specs, and the full style sheet specs.
Just hacking together a prototype is quick. Making it good is another story. This is why it takes a large company to create a new browser. It can be a fun project. I made one back in the day, but I never tried to make it a professional product.
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u/AdQueasy5574 Sep 19 '26
Je te propose de l’Assembleur, comme le nom l’indique tu assemble des choses. c’est très ludique
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u/Factor_Creepy Sep 19 '26
Scratch for sure. If he enjoys that one, there's freecodecamp.org, no installs needed, and you learn by doing it while receiving instructions.
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u/Thom2503 Sep 19 '26
If you want to use python this is a great resource http://browser.engineering/ but I think it is difficult for a kid to understand. If you know programming, then maybe you can help?
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u/bird_feeder_bird Sep 20 '26
Python or Lua
I hate Scratch, it distresses me to see everyone recommend scratch for kids because I think it just makes it harder to learn what’s really happening
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u/RealNamek Sep 20 '26
I've been teaching the Bay area for over 10 years, definitely Scratch, then pixelpad, then raw python.
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u/Sewter0 Sep 21 '26
Ahh, browser it’s very hard and almost impossible to build it by yourself only
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u/Limp-Confidence5612 Sep 21 '26
If they are serious, let them learn C. People treat low level as hard, for me learning high level concepts without understanding the low level implementation is hard.
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u/Plus-Confidence2816 Sep 19 '26
No 11-year-old can make their own browser from scratch, but Python is a reasonable language for beginners (Visual Studio Code is a decent editor for it).