(This site is currently under development. Please bear with us while our efforts are focussed on completing the language and its IDE.)

Elan - short for 'Educational language' - is the first new programming language designed specifically for teaching in British schools since BBC Basic in 1981.

Elan is free, open source, and focussed on the needs of education (targeting KS3-KS5) - and will remain so. It runs within a browser, either from this site, or from your school web server, or just as a standalone Html page saved on your desktop.

Elan is currently at Beta stage - neither complete nor completely bug-free! You are invited to try out the Beta (see link below). We suggest you start by exploring and runnning the Demo programs (button on top-left of screen). The Help button takes you to the (incomplete) Reference Manual.

Useful links

• Use the Beta version of Elan
• Watch one of many of our short instructional videos on specific aspects of Elan (more being added regularly).
• Go to our discussion forum on GitHub to raise questions, file a bug report, or make suggestions for improvement.
• Read or download the Reference Manual as a .pdf file. (Currently incomplete, it will be added to regularly).

Basics

• Elan is a compiled language. It compiles to JavaScript.
• Elan is statically-typed.
• Elan is multi-paradigm, supporting procedural, object-oriented, and functional programming. Its support for the latter is much stronger than most multi-paradigm languages because Elan enforces that all functions are pure functions (side-effect free, with no external dependencies).
• The Elan language and IDE are tightly integrated. The only way to create, edit, compile, and run Elan programs is via this IDE.