Java in College: "You might as well be teaching Chinese to a monkey."

Wow, I never thought of it that way, but it really makes a lot of sense.

I had an interesting expereience a while ago where I helped a friend doing a website. There was a backend involved where he would have to type some numbers into a table (how much of x, y, x... do you need when you are a certain age). I spent hours trying to explain to him why he couldn't just draw a graph on the screen, like he would on a piece of paper, and let the computer find out what the values were. He simply didn't get the basic concepts behind it and thought that the computer should easily be able to see the graph and decide what to do. He thought that is should be just as easy to draw a graph on screen and get the numbers from there as entering numbers manually.

It became apparent that he just didn't think sequentially and logically. Notions like if x is larger than y and y is larger than z then x is larger than z were extremely difficult for him to grasp. He isn't stupid by any means, he simply thinks about the world differently. And he would never get even a simple program to run no matter how much he tried.

How many hours a week did you study German in college? I think children growing up in Germany typically study it about 70 to 90 hours a week if their parents are foreigners, or 110 hours a week otherwise, and it takes them about six or seven years to reach a high level of proficiency.

By contrast, an acquaintance of mine studied Mandarin Chinese only 40 hours a week as an adult (22-year-old I think) for six months, and then spent the next several years transcribing and analyzing intercepted Chinese telephone conversations 40 hours a week for the next couple of years, thereby achieving a native level of proficiency.

So my alternative hypothesis is that kids learn languages well because they try really hard for tens of thousands of hours, while adults rarely do.

System.out.println("Hello world");

...in fact, this is well organized. "System" is a namespace. "out" is a static variable. "println" is a static function. "Hello world" is a String. These things all exist in an orderly world. A professor could explain a lot of key elements of language design with that one line. What's this:

print("Hello world")

...it's shorthand for much the same. Easier? Yep. But it's glossing over a lot of details that students need to know.

So when you come at it from a teaching angle, you're maybe making a mistake. Python/Ruby/LISP all have their WTFs that will throw off students, even if they're all better languages than Java.

    System.out.println("Hello world");

    print("Hello world")

Java's not even a good example of what OO is, and it has way too much syntax and special keywords (something like 50) for teaching.

Python is a far better language for teaching, Smalltalk would be even better because it's much simpler, has only a handful of keywords, and a much more consistent and simpler syntax.

In any case, students should begins with a dynamic language where they don't have to think about manifest types that they aren't ready to understand anyway. It's also much faster working in a workspace or REPL where you have instant feedback and can experiment without messing around with compilers.