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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?"
Python and Ruby are very similar, and I would recommend them about equally. C/C++ are bastard hard as starter languages, and VB is just about the tool of the deevil.
Voodoo Girl is the bomb!
I've found that python works really well as a beginning language. Python (and many other interpreted languages) let you write fully functional programs with very few programming concepts. It's really easy to introduce one concept at a time, focus on it, and then use that to introduce the next.
You can start small by using the interpreter as a calculator, then move the caculations to a script and executing that. After a while you can gradually introduce variables, comments, functions and modules. After that, you could introduce the standard library and show how to print the contents of a file or download a web page. Or you could introduce the OO concepts of classes, encapsulation, polymorphism and inheritance. It's really up to you and how well your students are going.
Advanced students should also be able to create simple GUI or command line interfaces. Python has a great base class for command line programs that takes away most of the tedious parts. It also has some simple and easy database modules if you want to teach relational databases and SQL as well as programming.
But don't forget that the most important thing to do is to teach them how to teach themselves. Show how to look through the standard library for something new, or how to find and install new modules from the net.
When everyone has become comfortable with the language (and if you have the time) you can introduce a similar language for contrast. I've found that people who have experience with a wider variety of languages tend to be able to "grok" programs a bit easier than those who haven't.
The idea that learning something can "mutilate" you or decrease your ability to learn other things is crap. I, and most of the good programmers I know personally, learned on BASIC - evil old unrepentant BASIC, full of GOTO and GOSUB. Maybe Dijkstra had trouble teaching "good programming style" to students with a BASIC background because they had experience, and weren't automatically willing to accept someone else's definition of "good". Or maybe he was just kidding.
BASIC was grungy, useful, widely available, and offered a fast edit-run loop - key ingredients in getting a lot of kids hooked on computers.