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

It would move the conversation forward if people were up front about which metric they’re trying to move. For example, here are two equally valid pedagogical goals that are in tension with each other - helping everyone become a programmer (no dropouts) and making sure every programmer meets some pre-defined criteria (strong understanding of memory layout or type theory or ability to build products). If your pre-defined criteria includes understanding of type theory, you might start with Haskell. Certainly all surviving members of your starting cohort would succeed according to your criteria, but this is only success if you didn’t mind people dropping out. Conversely, a language like python might help fewer students drop out, but they might have “weaker fundamentals” for some definition of that.

So let’s be clear about what success looks like. Let’s state a hypothesis for success and which metrics we’ll use to measure that. Let’s verify that hypothesis by offering the teaching approach to similar groups and interpreting the results.

We can do better than “I was taught like xyz, and I’m successful now and so that was definitely the right approach”.

Lastly, some people in this thread claimed that anyone can become a programmer if the teaching is good enough. On this, I’d like to paraphrase fictional food critic Anton Ego - “only now do I understand what was meant by the motto ‘Anyone Can Cook’. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere.”

https://hpjansson.org/blag/2018/07/24/a-hash-table-re-hash/

Uh, not exactly. I had a really hard time learning prolog because it doesn't really have if-then-else. Haskell is missing the idea of something happening after something else. Stack languages don't have variables. And so on - there's a lot more to programming than python.

There's a big class of popular structured / OO languages which are quite similar (C, JS, Python, Java, etc). But they certainly aren't "every language". Not by a long shot.

And even amongst those languages there's huge variety in how the grain of the languages shape the code we write. I was talking to a grizzled old programmer at a conference a few years ago about the performance of java vs C. He said in some benchmarks he did the performance was almost identical. I got him to show me his code - and sure enough, he wrote java as if it were C. He was using native java arrays everywhere and basically everything was a primitive variable, in huge classes acting more as buckets for code than anything else. His code was unrecognisable as java because he was still writing C, just with a different syntax.

> The basics of programming are not about being correct so much as not being lost.

The basis of programming is expression. The most idiomatic way to express yourself in each language is very different. Its as much cultural as it is syntactic.