Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
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Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#2this bit from the article surprised me
8I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments, and having this built-in to the IDE or dub would be immensely helpful for using D for learning.
8it does seem to have worked out in the end, but I would personally not have considered anything where building was not one click of a button in an ide; build toolchains add a tremendous amount of complexity to learning a new language, and especially if this is also an intro to programming I would consider it a fatal lack.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#3Time to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines here, namely, that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#4Time to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines here, namely, that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'
That certainly works for clickbaity headlines. This one seems like a genuine question.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#5Time to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines here, namely, that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'
Imagine a headline "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines True?"
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#6Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#7this bit from the article surprised me 8 I spend an inordinate amount of time helping the kids set up their build environments, and having this built-in to the IDE or dub would be immensely helpful for using D for learning. 8 it does seem to have worked out in the end, but I would personally not have considered anything where building was not one click of a button in an ide; build toolchains add a tremendous amount o…
I ended up teaching a friend to program using Kotlin. The downside was just telling them to just accept what the IDE wizard lays down as gospel first but the advantage was that running code from main() or tests was always a fully IDE integrated experience. Explaining the build system boilerplate became natural when it came time to start adding dependencies to the project.
Don't underestimate how important that integrated experience is. Within their first month or so they were already using a real graphical debugger which is something I didn't pick up until much later because of where I started.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#8> I am confident that D can be a viable first language
Not sure what this confidence is based on, the basics are broken (toolchain, basic syntax errors you shouldn't even need a compile step to figure out, the squiggly error underline should be right there in your editor!), and what does sticking to "Vanilla D" offer as a benefit vs. some other language?
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#9Time to apply Betteridge's Law of Headlines here, namely, that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no.'
Imagine a headline "Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines True?"
Related:
1. James M. Cook & Dawn Plourde. (2016). Do scholars follow Betteridge’s Law? The use of questions in journal article titles. Scientometrics, 108(3), 1119–1128. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-016-2030-2
2. Boris Peon. (1988, August 4). IS HINCHLIFFE’S RULE TRUE?·. Annals of Gnosis.
3. Stuart M Shieber. (2015, June). Is This Article Consistent with Hinchliffe’s Rule? Annals of Improbable Research, 21(3), 18–19. https://improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume21/v21i3/Con...
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#10BASIC and Pascal used to be "teaching languages", though Python & JS seem to have displaced them and teaching sure can be hard. This tries to use Nim: https://www.nimprogrammingbook.com/book/nimprogramming_adoc-...