John Resig: JavaScript as a First Language

My first class in high school was the basic Java 101. The teacher did not know anything more than how to draw UML diagrams and tell us to use for loops. He had been teaching the class for years and had no industry experience. I imagine 10 years ago he figured out all the questions he was going to ask and learned just enough to explain the really difficult ones. He was not a zen master LISP programmer who had glided down from the plane of Forms to enlighten us.

But I started to learn programming because of him. He knew what he knew and he had his presentation down. I didn't know how to program so anything was better than what I was going with. He explained terms and ideas in the most stereotypical of ways. But they made sense. In a way, he passed off his framework of knowledge to those who cared to take it. It was incredibly mind expanding at the time.

And so I had this little ball of specific domain knowledge. I wanted to be able to do cool stuff though on my website though. Java wasn't quite there yet, couldn't do all the things I wanted it to do. So I picked up Javascript from W3 schools online. It was terrible, awful Javascript that I have purposefully forgotten. But I could make my pages interactive, I could impress my friends. My little ball of know how was growing and expanding. I kept at it and started seeing how Java "sucked" and why Javascript was the One True Language. New ideas like functions as variables, easy to run scripts, interactive webpages, they all got added on and replaced old less useful ideas from Java.

Pretty soon after that I started actively learning Mathematica in college. The whole IDE is just lisp with some mathematical lipstick, but I didn't know that at the time. I started thinking of how to solve problems with lists, how to use IDE's, and reading and writing to files so I wouldn't have to redo everything each time. I had programs that wouldn't run in less than a second which made me really aware of what I was writing and how to optimize things.

And the story just keeps going and going on like that. Common lisp with Emacs last winter because of PG. More Mathematica and jQuery during last spring and summer because of an Internship. Node, Haskell, Clojure, Python during this past fall for enlightenment. And now R and, maybe, Ruby/Rails during the winter because I have ideas I want to make happen. I'm by no means a professional, but I know enough to shoot the shit with the CS majors and randomly drop into tech meetups (What up Cinci.rb!)

All that sprung from a high school class taught by a standard teacher on a shitty language that I don't ever want to touch again. And so when people talk about first languages and why X will be an absolutely horrible language to use to learn, I zone out. Every language is going to be a horrible first language. All of them. I don't care what arguments you make about js gotchas or Python's batteries included or why scheme is more beautifuller than common. If you don't know how to program, learning how to program is going to suck. Period. Maybe learning C++ first isn't the hottest idea, but at some point you have to grit your teeth and go "Programming is hard."

So I applaud Resig's and Khan Academy's use of javascript. Not because I love javascript, but because I know they are going to doing an amazing job presenting the tiny balls of programming knowledge to kids across the world. They could have picked most any mainstream language they want to present these ideas with and I would still be excited by their ideas. All that matters is how they plant the seeds. If they can stir up a kid's desire enough to get over the "ARRAYS SUCK. FOR LOOPS SUCK. WHY WON'T MY PROGRAM COMPILEEEE." and learn the next language or build the next project, then they have done an amazing job and good for the world.

tl;dr Programming is hard, every language has it's own use, waffling about the choice of languages isn't going to teach you what you need to know any faster.

Then you get into issues with multiple operating systems. Windows does it one way and Linux and OSX does it another way. Also, the tools you've mentioned are always changing. Will it be the same in a year or two?

But won't they need to install an editor anyways? Or are they just going to use notepad? That will be a horrible experience.

And JS is changing too. None of the languages change so drastically that it's not just something simple to incrementally learn. And I think getting students used to the fact that things change isn't a bad thing. But also let them know that typically backwards compat isn't broken with these changes.

With that said I'm a big fan of JS as a first language. I'd probably spend the first day with them using notepad or vi (or whatever is natively installed on the system) -- and then have them install some nice IDE of my choosing.