But why? Why use esoteric languages no one knows?? Why teach someone a language they can’t use at work? Just teach Go it’s so simple and teaches you actually good practices unlike Python. Senior devs hate it and junior devs love it for the same reason.
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)
#32This is roughly the same as teaching Esperanto to child as his / her first language.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
What stop schools giving out pre-installed virtual machine images? Most people don't setup their own environment for their first language....
Sure they do. You can tell anyone to "just install IntelliJ" or "just install Xcode" and they'll have a working environment with zero effort. All the popular languages don't require handholding
I would attribute that to the language/company putting in the effort for an easy install. I am sure it is easy to install Swift on Mac but I was trying to guide my friend through it on Windows and he gave up because it was too complex and the installer didn't work immediately (some library path error).
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#34"The D Blog" came to the conclusion, that D is a good language for kids.
no one could have saw this coming! they cant keep getting away with it
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m not sure that the choice of the language matters a great deal for an intro course to be honest There’s no way students can wrap their heads around advanced topics to the point where language selection matters that much Of course toy languages like Brainfuck, low level stuff like pure assembly or archaic languages like COBOL would be detrimental to learning. But any mainstream language from the last forty years or…
> I’m not sure that the choice of the language matters a great deal for an intro course to be honest Huge disagreement from me! The choice might not matter for the already motivated students who were going to learn to code no matter the language, but for folks on the fringe of CS the language matters immensely. There are arguments to be made about frustration, developer experience, grokability, but imo the most impor…
agreed -- i really like python a lot for a first (and long term lang). it reads like english compared to C or Java and you could toss up a website or something like that very quickly with it.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#36But why? Why use esoteric languages no one knows?? Why teach someone a language they can’t use at work? Just teach Go it’s so simple and teaches you actually good practices unlike Python. Senior devs hate it and junior devs love it for the same reason.
I think “esoteric” is meant for brainfuck, maldbrot and similar. D, nim and co, are quite traditional in language design languages, just not popular (yet).
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#37I think Scratch makes a great introduction to programming because of the playfull assets which are bundled with it, sprites, sounds, backgrounds etc. This significantly lowers the bar to making something productive and visually stimulating, something which I believe is necessary to engage when competing with modern games, phones etc. There is no text based language (please correct me if I have missed one) that makes…
One of my favorite professors was using Processing, which was confusing for some, but it really helped that the students got to visually see results. I have to wonder if we allowed people to learn programming significantly better when RAD IDE languages were more common like VB6 and Delphi. Something about visually seeing what you're building vs just seeing text on a screen. I guess it would only affect SOME people le…
> Something about visually seeing what you're building vs just seeing text on a screen.
When i learned programming as a child, the programs i wrote just produced text on a screen -- but text on a screen was an actually encountered everyday UX on the Apple IIe or Commodore 64 too.
I think it does make a difference how quickly you see yourself as making something that could actually be useful, and it's maybe harder to do that in 2023.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#38> After half a year we moved on to our second language: Lua, specifically in the video game system Roblox. I almost wish we had skipped this one because it was a bit too advanced for these students
I wonder if they meant Lua or its integration with Roblox was too advanced. I would think Lua is a simpler and easier to learn language relative to Javascript and D.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#39I think Scratch makes a great introduction to programming because of the playfull assets which are bundled with it, sprites, sounds, backgrounds etc. This significantly lowers the bar to making something productive and visually stimulating, something which I believe is necessary to engage when competing with modern games, phones etc. There is no text based language (please correct me if I have missed one) that makes…
The "Visual" series of IDEs used to exist. Also the "Builder" series from Borland. It was the reason why Delphi (a kind of Visual Pascal Builder?) Was só stupidly popular. Same thing for Visual Basic. I used to look down on then but now I realize they being gone is a bad thing.
Delphi still exists. So does Lazarus ( open source version ).
For BASIC, there is GAMBAS.
There is also OpenXava for Java.
The lack of popularity is not just because they do not exist.
Re: Teaching D from Scratch: Is it a viable first language? (2021)
#40But why? Why use esoteric languages no one knows?? Why teach someone a language they can’t use at work? Just teach Go it’s so simple and teaches you actually good practices unlike Python. Senior devs hate it and junior devs love it for the same reason.
> Why teach someone a language they can’t use at work?
Not everything is about work, especially for children.