Best Language for Beginner Programmers?

jahardman asks: "I work at a High School that has recently seen a decline in the number of students that want to take our entry level-programming course in Visual Basic. We have been toying with the idea of having the introduction course be in PHP or Ruby on Rails; but are not convinced that they lead well into higher level languages. Does anyone out there have suggestions as to what would be a better language to start students with? Ideally one that might be more 'enticing' as well?"

Comments

DrScheme

[sleepingsquirrel]

Give DrScheme a look. Nice graphical IDE, libraries, dead simple syntax. Free. Different language levels to cater to the learning process. And pleanty of introductory texts.

Re:consider Python

[croddy]

I agree. Python is an excellent starting point for beginning programmers:

It has a very clean, refined syntax; It can be used equally well as an object-oriented language as a simple procedural scipting language; It is open-source, freely distributed, and cross-platform (so that students will be assured of the ability to install it on their home PC's easily and legally); and while it is easily extended, it has a very useful standard library which will fill the needs of beginning programmers for a few years to come.

Ruby is very similar to Python, and is another excellent choice, although I feel that the documentation for Python (in English, at least) is somewhat better.

Neither PHP nor Rails are good choices for beginning programmers -- while developing web applications is very simple for advanced and intermediate coders, remember that beginners can get into some serious trouble learning a programming language, a query language, and a markup language all at the same time. Perhaps these would be better for a second course.

Python has a free book and pygame

[edalytical]

Python is definitely the way to go. There is a free book that is written especially for High School CS classes, it's called How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python. You can get it here: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/ for free in any of these electronic formats: PDF, LaTeX, Postscript, and HTML. Or you can buy printed copies here: http://greenteapress.com/thinkpython/terms.html

In addition to that there is pygame. A set of Python modules designed for writing games. It's really simple and easy to use. I think even beginner programmers wouldn't have much trouble making simple games. I wrote a breakout clone that's only 147 lines, I was going to use it to teach a programming class too. There is nothing complicated in it at all, just a few loops, if statements, some rectangle geometry and negating numbers. Elementary, really.

I think Python fits the requirement, more so than any other, for a language "that might be more 'enticing' as well."