This is old, and there are no mentions of Erlang, Haskell or Scheme.
Not even PHP which while it isn't perfect it's still pretty easy to learn.
A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Languages for Teaching Computer Programming
31–35 of 35 posts
Re: A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Languages for Teaching Computer Programming
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the more I think about it, the more I like C. It gives you the best understanding of what computations are actually being done by your processor Yes, because C is exactly how computers work inside! SO CLOSE TO THE METAL > the mental exercises involved with fulling understanding pointers is valuable at the collegiate level I have learnt about mappings in mathematics in kindergarten. Literally. Then in university…
I never said it was mind bending. I said it was a good mental exercise for young engineers to go through to fully understand pointers. It's one thing to read about pointers, it's another to actually implement a linked list in C. Again, I want to stress I don't think you should get awarded a PhD for it, but for first year CS majors: it is good practice to actually implement and debug pointer-based data structures.
Yeah, but you're obviously arguing about that it's notable that you can learn about pointers. It's a tiny block of knowledge, really minuscule in comparison to other things which you can learn in the first year, such as the notion of an isomorphism, with assorted examples. I'd say this one can easily fill up about 100x more lab time.
Re: A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Languages for Teaching Computer Programming
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you realize that with pipelining, preemptive computation, multiple levels of caching, opcode optimization, NUMA, massive parallelism, and all that other stuff x86 is to hardware what Java is to hardware interrupts? Answer: you don't because otherwise you would not have posted the above.
You're over exaggerating. You can teach students about processor theory, assembly language and C without getting into all the extra stuff. All the extra stuff is built on that foundation, and learning C helps you understand that foundation better than any other language.
This is not "extra stuff". It is how it works. x86 was made to be simple to hand-code, not to in any way reflect the hardware. And then, decades later, new developments to it are so that it's easy to compile to. The language went through two major paradigms without either having the point of x86 reflecting the hardware it abstracts. SIMD, NUMA, pipelining and caching is exactly how processors work right now. And they're radically different to what happened before the Intel Core family of processors. This is in turn radically different to what happened before the Pentium Pro family of processors. Yet all support the same x86 instruction set. The corollary is that x86 is an abstraction. You're being ignorant if you think x86 is like the opcodes being executed after the whole caching stage has happened.
Re: A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Languages for Teaching Computer Programming
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the more I think about it, the more I like C. It gives you the best understanding of what computations are actually being done by your processor Yes, because C is exactly how computers work inside! SO CLOSE TO THE METAL > the mental exercises involved with fulling understanding pointers is valuable at the collegiate level I have learnt about mappings in mathematics in kindergarten. Literally. Then in university…
C is not CLOSE TO THE METAL. It lacks concept of SIMD instructions and barriers/fences. If you want to be CTM learn OpenCL / CUDA (unless you want to learn assembler for actual ISAs or SIMD extensions).
Thanks for spelling it out, I am surprised there are people in this year and age who would not get that "C is close to the metal" is a trite joke.
Re: A Very Quick Comparison of Popular Languages for Teaching Computer Programming
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
But do we really need to submit beginners to things like segmentation faults, arrays without bound checks and the lack of a reasonable string datatype? There is no reason to use C as a first language when you can just as well teach all the basic ideas in a more friendly environment and then go through all of K&R in 2 weeks or so.
The problem with OOP is that its really not something that should be taught to people who are first learning to program. It is extra complexity and doesn't add any value for beginners. That is my problem with Python. C has its disadvantages, but you get: 1-a simple syntax 2-good mental exercises in learning, implementing and debugging pointer based data structures 3-a good idea of what is happening at the processor l…
Where did you get the idea that I was supporting OOP-first? Its a terrible idea too.
In any case, I think Python is a great procedural language out there for a beginner - you can use the classes as if they were just structs and go a long way with that.