Honest question: Does the kid really want learn via dealing with a book? Programming has such a wonderful virtuous feelback look built in, seems a shame to get in the way of that. My son learned a ton of programming mainly by building bigger and bigger things (with more and less help from me), and only after many years got to a point where researching a question on stackoverflow/etc started working for him. All the progress was well-motivated by the task at hand, not the next page of the book.
One tool that we found to be a very deep learning ground: an iPad app called Tynker. It is another block-based env like Scratch, though we found Tynker to have stronger primitives (e.g., you wind up forced to use globals to pass state around less often). Some big advantages: 1) iPad is super portable, so works when travelling 2) has an excellent physics engine built in - we made an Angry Birds clone 3) was strong enough to support making a piano app that can play concurrent tones. 4) Lots of samples shared by community for inspiration.
NeXT wasn't bought until late 1996. That didnt kill the RISC project, what happened is the company dropped all hardware and became software-only (primarily on top of x86 boxes, but some lower-level pieces ran on HP and SPARC).
The original OS absolutely had shared libraries - the whole environment was so RAM-constrained that it was essential. (source - I was part of the early SW eng team). In fact, my memory is that they worked much better than competing systems because of Objective-C's late binding, in the practical case of sharing library code across applications built/shipped at different times on different OS versions. As I recall, C++ based systems couldn't deliver the full sharing on a typical user's system who was never running apps that were all updated for each major and minor release.
I feel like the Isaacson bio is fairly accurate factually on that time, from what I knew as a senior SW Eng at NeXT/Apple. It was a huge course change, eventually pushed through the entire software org by Steve, the NeXT leadership and a set of Apple folks that chose to embrace the new direction.
I strongly disagree. Amelio's Macworld 1997 keynote was a legendary failure, just a shocking public show of incompetence. He built zero confidence in anyone joining from NeXT. His book shows a poor understanding of what happened at Apple ("wow, I directed a VP to go write a new modern OS, and they just never did it!?!"). There was no useful depth of vision or insight coming from him or Hancock at the time (my opinion as a lead eng from that time), and it is clear to me that Apple would have continued to spiral into oblivion under their lead (like yahoo).
I'll grant that he did spark the revival by doing the NeXT deal, as Apple did need an acquisition to reboot the software stack.
I dont blame Copland on Amelio, like the product was moribund before he got there, he had the sense to realize it was moribund, hire someone to verify that and then to cancel it and go find something else.
No, Copland could have shipped. It would have taken some actual management skill to get it there. Gil's contribution was to buy his way out of the problem.
Gifted kids are all really different in their specific strengths. That said, for one with a well-expressed nerd gene, we started at age 6. I would start with an iPad app (slightly simpler container than a browser), maybe that gamifies the whole thing a bit with some easy on-ramps. For us that was Tynker and a bit of Hopscotch. It's pretty easy to tell whether you've got any sparks of interest on your hands, else no point in pushing it.
My son and I got a lot out of a similar iPad app called Tynker, which we both ended up liking better than Scratch, which he used at school. Tynker has a physics engine, which opens up all sort of great game possibilities (we made a cheapo Angry Birds). Also as referenced above, Tynker has a slightly richer language that gets rid of the need for some bad practices (e.g., functions can return values, you can declare local vars vs all-globals-all-the-time, etc). Having the tool work well on a tablet also travels really well, and is a simpler container than a browser window for a really young kid.
We've not had a big problem getting candidate streams of people who want to work with Ruby. In a way I don't mind having an implicit filter against people who only want to work with shiny new things, as we don't really want our platform filled with everyone's favorite shiny technologies any more than we need a shiny language to write a good-sized e-commerce web app.
