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Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

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Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#81

Post by werber »

lupire wrote: post #45
werber wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m primarily a front and developer and I wish that was the way I went. When I work in even basic back end code now I feel unprepared. I highly doubt I’ll ever write assembly code and if someone was to ask me to I would essentially face plant

there's no need or special value in learning assembly first. you can learn it after.

I agree completely, for me, writing code is a way to get money and a tool to bring ideas to life and I haven’t found an idea in my head that needed it

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#82

Post by foxes »

Declarative languages are then the natural choice. Instead of reasoning about arbitrary control flow semantics you can just think about what your program is actually meant to be doing. Then if you need to zoom in later and manipulate state/control flow directly that’s a new paradigm to learn.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#83

Post by wyager »

benrbray wrote: post #42
wyager wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a student has trouble transferring their knowledge of programming fundamentals “Programming fundamentals” isn’t the same from language to language. It’s inconceivable that a student who learned to program with python would develop the same type of fundamental understanding as a student who used C (to develop an understanding of memory-level APIs) or Haskell (to develop an understanding of type and semantic theor…

> I don’t think everyone can understand computer science. This is a bold claim. None of us are special for working in tech. Our life has presented us the opportunity and passion to invest ourselves deeply in the field, often at great opportunity cost. Saying that a bad teacher makes no difference in student outcomes is equally ridiculous as saying an excellent teacher makes no difference in student outcomes. If that'…

> None of us are special for working in tech

Computer occupations as a whole have a median intelligence at least 1stddev in excess of the population median. https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/2002-hauser.pdf I have to imagine that programmers in particular are even higher.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#84

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nsonha wrote: post #69
alejohausner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. At the very least, teach assembly in the first term, at the same time as students are learning a high level language. If you know assembly, you can understand why arrays exist in C ( because CPUs have base-and-offset addressing), why records exist (same reason), what pointers are (assembly is pretty much about pointers), why ints are different from floats (ADD vs FADD) and so on, how functions are called (sy…

We have dedicated classes in computer architecture to learn all the things you mention, it's not the job of a programming language to teach them to you When I first learn C in highschool the asign statement was what bugged me the most because I had already has a math background at that point so statements such as x = x + 1 made no sense, and even in natural science general, the idea that you can "asign" new intrinsic…

Well, I had a similar experience in algebra. Here's an equation; it's the problem we're trying to solve. And we do this operation to both sides, and we get a simpler problem. OK, I understand that. And we do another thing to both sides, and we get an even simpler problem. Great. And we keep doing it, and we get... the answer??? Not a simpler problem, but the answer? How did that happen? Blew my mind.

I eventually decided that what we actually got was a very simple problem, so simple that the answer was trivially obvious.

In contrast, it was trivially obvious to me what "x = x + 1" was doing, even on day 1.

Maybe I'm unique. But I suspect that different people trip on different things. Some trip on "x = x + 1", but that doesn't mean that it's a bad syntax. "x := x + 1" is going to make you type an extra character in every assignment over the next 40 years, in order to prevent confusion in a high school or college class. That may not be a good trade off. It especially may not be a good trade off when not everybody trips on it. (I didn't ask them to change the way they did algebra problems.)

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#85

Post by AnimalMuppet »

tmaly wrote: post #20

I think it is possible to teach concepts like variables, loops, conditionals regardless of the language.

I don't know about that. It might be harder to teach loops in Haskell, APL, or Prolog than it is in some more conventional languages.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#86

Post by aaronchall »

I learnt BASIC mostly by myself when I was in elementary school (because programming computers must be cool, and I was sure I could do it).

I self-taught myself computing concepts all my life.

I self-taught myself Python (in earnest) while in MBA school (because I believed spreadsheets needed to die and Python would be a good spreadsheet killer).

I've been teaching Python to other students in the last few years. It's usually their first programming language (if not, R probably was).

I've always believed in being a computer language polyglot, if only to be able to communicate with others from other languages and to learn what those languages have to teach us, but I'm also of the opinion that one should stick to one's strengths.

I would agree that we should think the initial programming language doesn't matter - if we're simply looking at whether we can communicate or translate fundamental mathematics of computation.

However, when a student is an adult trying to get immediate value from the learning (instead of the gratification of increasing pure knowledge, like I did) their choice of language matters greatly.

My first recommendation to anyone asking me is of course Python, due to broad applicability (which means learning one time a language that can be used to scrape the web, provision a restful API, or do complex data analysis), license (free to use), cross-platform compatibility (MacOS, Windows, Linux), popularity (which leads to ease of getting help), all leading to a good reputation for readability and maintainability (which is encouraging broad industry adoption meaning more jobs for Python programmers).

Of course, for specific applications, the recommendation may be different, such as JS or TypeScript for front-end development, or C or Rust for low-level programming, or Lisp, Elm, or Haskell for functional programming in their respective domains.

Further, Haskell and Elm have greatly informed my approach to object oriented programming - I feel like they have made me better and made my Python more robust and straightforward. I didn't learn them first though. In retrospect, I feel like I could have easily learnt them first. I wonder how I would look at my Python if I had done so - what would indeed be different? I don't know.

But I do know, for pragmatic purposes, first programming language does matter greatly.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#87

Post by throwawayboise »

chrisaycock wrote: post #5

Given the ever-increasing amount of automation in the economy, I believe that programming (of one form or another) is going to become a skill as important as writing. Everyone learns how to write in school, even though only a few become novelists or journalists. Similarly, everyone will learn to code even though only a few will become data scientists or software engineers. Programming for non-professionals looks a lo…

It has been a pipe dream of some since the 1960s that "everybody" would program computers in the future. It hasn't happened and won't happen. Most people simply don't have the patience for it.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#88

Post by [deleted] »

benrbray wrote: post #42
wyager wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a student has trouble transferring their knowledge of programming fundamentals “Programming fundamentals” isn’t the same from language to language. It’s inconceivable that a student who learned to program with python would develop the same type of fundamental understanding as a student who used C (to develop an understanding of memory-level APIs) or Haskell (to develop an understanding of type and semantic theor…

> I don’t think everyone can understand computer science. This is a bold claim. None of us are special for working in tech. Our life has presented us the opportunity and passion to invest ourselves deeply in the field, often at great opportunity cost. Saying that a bad teacher makes no difference in student outcomes is equally ridiculous as saying an excellent teacher makes no difference in student outcomes. If that'…

[deleted]

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#89

Post by nsonha »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #84
nsonha wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have dedicated classes in computer architecture to learn all the things you mention, it's not the job of a programming language to teach them to you When I first learn C in highschool the asign statement was what bugged me the most because I had already has a math background at that point so statements such as x = x + 1 made no sense, and even in natural science general, the idea that you can "asign" new intrinsic…

Well, I had a similar experience in algebra. Here's an equation; it's the problem we're trying to solve. And we do this operation to both sides, and we get a simpler problem. OK, I understand that. And we do another thing to both sides, and we get an even simpler problem. Great. And we keep doing it, and we get... the answer??? Not a simpler problem, but the answer? How did that happen? Blew my mind. I eventually dec…

my quibble is not really about the equality symbol, more about assignments as a fundamental building concept of code.

(Re)assignments exist in social interaction so I guess it's intuitive to people that way, but if you look at code from a perspective of modeling reality that's just not a thing that exists in nature. Maybe it's just me.

Re: Why did we ever think a student's first programming language didn't matter?

#90

Post by b5n »

garmaine wrote: post #73
username90 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is an argument for teaching intro programming in C so they better understand what operations a computer is capable of doing. When you are used to C most other languages feels like a library that automates tedious tasks rather than something alien, you are well aware of the things needed to happen in the background so that the code you write in other languages can do what it does.

C imparts a very specific architecture onto your code. Scheme is more of a blank slate upon which many different paradigms can be taught.

I've never looked under the hood of a `cdr` implementation but I feel pretty confident in saying that it's likely to be an incremented pointer most of the time.

Learning C (and even a little ASM), gives a better understanding of the underlying layers. I think that provides a great foundation for learning a scheme, and then branching out from there.

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