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The Best First Language For a Young Programmer
snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister questions whether Scheme, a dialect of Lisp taught as part of many first-year CS curricula and considered by some to be the 'latin of programming,' is really the best first language for a young programmer. As he sees it, the essentially write-only Scheme requires you to bore down into the source code just to figure out what a Scheme program is trying to do — excellent for teaching programming but 'lousy for a 15-year-old trying to figure out how to make a computer do stuff on his own.' And though the 'hacker ethic' may in fact be harming today's developers, McAllister still suggests we encourage the young to 'develop the innate curiosity and love of programming that lies at the heart of any really brilliant programmer' by simply encouraging them to fool around with whatever produces the most gratifying results. After all, as Jeff Atwood puts it, 'what we do is craftmanship, not engineering,' and inventing effective software solutions takes insight, inspiration, deduction, and often a sprinkling of luck. 'If that means coding in Visual Basic, so be it. Scheme can come later.'"
I always considered Pascal (or Delphi) a great language for beginners. Powerful enough, structured, type safe and very elegant. From there, jumping to other languages is quite easy.
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
I personally started out with Pascal in the mid nineties, and it was nice back then (before Delphi came around).
Nowadays I would suggest Python as firs language as it is fairly easy, clean and powerful general purpose scripting language. Then extend it with C/C++.
Just don't start with VB, PHP, Java or C# as it will screw the person up for lifetime.
No, it's *my* favourite language. Your favourite language is awful.
for the professors, that it. By removing all the syntax, etc, you can be introducing functions, lexical scope, binding, etc in the first week. Data structures and recursion in the second.
Result: most students quit by week two, and you are left with a fairly teachable remainder.
It teaches you how a computer really works. That way you can become a 'real' programmer instead of an IDE user.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
For a 15 year old? Python with the Pygame toolkit. There are other toolkits besides Pygame, but that one works well.
It seems like TFS is dealing with the fact that there are at least two distinct, and at times temporarily opposed, aspects of being educationally good.
The one is engagement/excitement/comprehensibility: If somebody is disinterested in, or hugely frustrated by, a subject on first contact, they will have minimal motivation to continue. Unless you simply plan to beat it into them, introductory material needs to grab the audience(this doesn't mean that everybody must be your audience, of course). In many cases, this means a (temporary) sacrifice of rigor or correctness; think of intro physics, where you start with simplified Newtonian scenarios, or math, where you generally start by talking about addition/subtraction/multiplication/division, not sets and number theory.
The second value is that of being correct and rigorous, or at least not impeding later development in completeness and rigor. You obviously cannot learn everything all at once; but there are some simplifications that make it easy to fill in the gaps later and others that actively retard that effort. This can happen either because the simplifications are hugely different than the reality, and harden people in the wrong ways, or because, in an attempt to be "engaging" the intro stuff promises that the subject will be "fun", "relevant", and "exciting" to everyone, every step of the way. Fact is, that isn't true. Most subjects have, at some point or another, patches of sucky grunt work. Promising people that they are precious flowers who will never have to soil their hands with such is a good way to make them drop out when they hit those patches.
First, learn assembly, it teaches you how the machine works. (You should probably also learn electronics and digital logic)
Then learn C, it is the most widely used in both commercial and open source.
Then learn C++, it is a better C.
Then learn Java, it rules the web.
Then learn Python, it has some very clever ideas.
Finally...never stop learning
In my opinion, two issues compound each other. The first is that because functional programming is seen as very pure and simple, there is a myth that Scheme programs do not need much documentation. The second is that Scheme functions do not declare return or argument types. This means that in order to read someone else's code, if structures of any complexity are used, you can have to manually walk the full call depth of each function, possibly many calls deep, just to know what kind of structure it returns in the end. That makes it painful to work with someone else's code, compounding the other well-known problem with computer science education: in the course, you're usually writing your own code from scrach; in the real world you usually have to deal with code your colleagues (or even third party projects) have written.
http://www.alice.org/index.php?page=what_is_alice/what_is_alice
"Alice is an innovative 3D programming environment that makes it easy to create an animation for telling a story, playing an interactive game, or a video to share on the web. Alice is a freely available teaching tool designed to be a student's first exposure to object-oriented programming. It allows students to learn fundamental programming concepts in the context of creating animated movies and simple video games. In Alice, 3-D objects (e.g., people, animals, and vehicles) populate a virtual world and students create a program to animate the objects.
In Alice's interactive interface, students drag and drop graphic tiles to create a program, where the instructions correspond to standard statements in a production oriented programming language, such as Java, C++, and C#. Alice allows students to immediately see how their animation programs run, enabling them to easily understand the relationship between the programming statements and the behavior of objects in their animation. By manipulating the objects in their virtual world, students gain experience with all the programming constructs typically taught in an introductory programming course."
kulakovich
My first year as a CS major I took "symbolic logic" to supplement to required Pascal, Fortran, and Assembly Language courses. After all that, I always thought of the symbolic logic class as the "Latin of programming". Personally, I think any language which is free and gives quick results would be suitable for beginners...Python, for example.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
Its not consistent, its not even well designed I expect, but its a remarkably easy way to learn to manipulate a computer. Learn a bit of HTML first, some CSS, then work on OO PHP and you can accomplish a lot. People will dismiss PHP but there are a lot of very large websites built using it - ones that lots of kids will be familiar with.
Follow it up with a second language once you have gotten the basics down pat - Python is likely a very good choice.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
I say fortunate because there was nothing in the way; no distractions like GUIs to dilute the experience. Just BASIC on the command line.
It doesn't really matter whether the youngster uses BASIC, Pascal, or XYZ. It should just be a simple language so the concept of logic and process flow is what is learned, rather than getting bogged down in arcane concepts of the language itself (or some pig of a GUI, like "Visual" this, or "Visual" that).
PS. The environment was an interactive "command line" and BASIC interpreter that actually was running as a batch job on an IBM 360 mainframe.
The best first language is anything simple that lets you jump right in and understand the basics like variables, loops, arrays, etc, without getting bogged down in an over complex or restrictive language. It doesn't need to be the worlds best language - it's to get you started. You could do far worse than start with a BASIC interpreter (instant feedback, no compiler/linker to deal with) at a very young age.
Those of use who started out at the beginning of the personal comnputer (not PC) phenomemon in the late 70's started out simple. After putting away your soldering iron, you got out pen and paper and started hand assembling machine code. And we liked it!
At the same time c.1978 a highschool math teacher and a bunch of us took adult education classes at the local university (Durham, UK), where they taught us PL/1, and some of us found a way to hang out at the university after that and started playing with BASIC, then taught ourself C. The big excitement was going from the batch-mode PL/1 class with jobs submitted on punched card decks, with printed green bar fanfold output (maybe just a syntax error) delivered some time later, to being ONLINE sitting in front of a terminal. Whoopee!
The best first language for a young programmer is english with possibly a little bit of boolean logic, because then he could search Slashdot and find one of the Ask Slashdot stories about what the best first language for young programmers is that appear every couple of months or so.
There are lots of good choices for a first programming language these days, but I thought I'd chime in and suggest Lua for consideration.
Lua is free.
The Lua interactive interpreter makes exploring and learning the language a pleasure (much like the Python interactive interpreter).
There are excellent and up-to-date free tutorials for Lua available online.
Lua integrates easily with C, giving you trivial access to any low level OS features you need.
The language is a pleasure to use. It just feels right.
Give it a shot. You won't be disappointed. :-)
People that knock the hacker ethic are a bunch of MBA drones that could never really build a damned thing themselves.
You learn to program by diving in and doing it. The more you practice and study, the better you get at it. GM was very good at shackling some very brilliant engineers and turning them into process drones. Look at where it got them. Great things are built by individuals and the more steps you have in the way of people being individuals, the worse you will get. Products have to be owned by the engineers that make them and they are personal works of art.
At the end of the day, the managers, bean counters, and all of these other people with their measurements, metrics and fancy charts are so much fluff, a tax on the capable in society... by really a bunch of leaches that could barely feed themselves as they lack the mental self sufficiency to do anything other than to try and ride the labor of others. We condemn socialism in society there's no real difference between the PM in a three piece suit and the lowest of the homeless people. Neither add any real value to society, its just that, the PM knows how to use PowerPoint and the homeless guy does not.
This is my sig.
Buy him a copy of C for Dummies and have done with it. C is kind of like the Latin of programming, except it's easier to learn than Latin.
I would have suggested BASIC around a decade ago, but I can't think of a modern BASIC implementation that's neither horrendously complex for a new programmer or insanely outdated.
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I wouldn't recommend Assembly. Most of the "under the hood" things are not the job of the programmer anymore. That's why we have compilers.
And that's why we have so much of shitty inefficient code around. Even when you program in a high-level language, you still have to realize how the code you write works on the machine level. I've seen PHP programmers throwing around calls to array_diff/array_unique, chaining them without mercy, without thinking about performance - because they think that those function are some magic black boxes and never consider a performance hit. "Oh, it's a C function, C is fast anyway from what I've heard". Like a good driver should know the inners of a car, how engine/transmission etc. work, otherwise he couldn't drive efficiently - a good programmer should know all the chain, from Java/Python/Scheme/Whatever down to the machine code.
ANY first programming language introduces new concepts. When you're starting out even something like the concept of a variable takes a little getting used to. Maybe you can relate it to memory store/recall on a pocket calculator, but with a name. Later you can introduce arrays of variables, non-numeric variables, etc.
You seem to have forgotten what it was like in the beginning to know *nothing*.
One not-so-obvious candidate: JavaScript and HTML.
Pretty much every browser in existence supports JavaScript, so with nothing more than a simple text editor and your browser of choice you can be off and running. As far as beginning programming is concerned, JavaScript easily encompasses any programmatic constructs you'd need.
The best part is that the students can easily display the results of their test programs in HTML, either dynamically generated or just by manipulating some divs, textboxes, tables etc that they've written on their page. Additionally, an instructor could write a 'playground' bit of HTML and JavaScript, so all output variables are bound up and easy to access. At that point the student is free to focus on what really matters, his/her first logic routines. When the student has created his first masterpiece, sharing the accomplishment with parents/peers is as simple as sharing a link to their HTML file.
I think this has the potential to engage students much faster than observing console output or fighting with a front end like windows forms in VB or Swing in Java.
Sauer
COBOL
Okay seriously I've just run out of pointless things to say.
I don't associate Scheme with 'the hacker ethic'. I don't strongly associate any language with hacker sensibilities. I do associate Scheme with the intellectual rigor required for a programmer who really has a clue about programming.
I think Scheme is an excellent language to teach college students who think that they know how to program because they managed to smoosh together a bunch of working PHP code and make a website. I think it is a poor language to teach high school students who are learning their first language.
The association of technical knowledge with competence irritates me. A competent painter needs to know about brushes and mixing paint, the difference between oil and acrylic, and a whole host of other technical details. But that's not how you get a good painting.
One of my reasons for feeling that Scheme is a good language for people who think they know how to program is that such people frequently know all about paint but do not have the depth of understanding to be a good painter. Scheme is a language that forces you to think about programming differently than you did before. And if you understand it you are on the path to being a good programmer rather than just a code monkey.
But I would not recommend it as a first language. I would recommend Python for that. Clean, concise, expressive and powerful. It's my favorite language for a reason. :-)
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
The problem with assembler, little Anonymous Coward, is that it doesn't let you do anything without a significant amount of work, and what you can do is unlikely to impress a fifteen-year-old kid just getting into programming.
Being able to print a few lines to the screen won't impress that kid and make him want to keep programming. Give him a language that can easily create GUIs, so he can see his stuff in action. To do this, I'd recommend an object-oriented language, maybe Python (though I personally detest it) or C# (which is a very nice language with very nice tools).
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
In Germany, researchers into didactics (teaching) of computer science (Informatik) have done some work on this topic. I recently found it when I was looking into materials for the computer science course in the Netherlands (seeing if I could do better).
Based on 15 criteria, they ranked 27 languages, ranging from Scheme to Haskell, ADA to Ocaml. The worst language for teaching was, by far, APL (scored a 5, which is the worst), followed closely by Perl. The best language for teaching was Algol 60 (1,50). Second best Python (1,66), 3rd place Ruby (1,88) and scraping in at a 4th spot was Pascal (2,14).
So to summarize: better dust off your Algol 60 books and compilers :P
Failing that, Python and Ruby are nice as well for just teaching programming (although if you want to show the distinction between imperative and functional programming I'm not altogether sure that Ruby would be enough).
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This was found in a (Dutch language) PDF: http://www.utwente.nl/elan/huidige_studenten/overig/OvO/OvO-inf/Eindverslag%20INF.pdf (see page 8 for the German criteria, and page 9 for the results). See the original research (*) here: http://subs.emis.de/LNI/Proceedings/Proceedings22/GI-Proceedings.22-12.pdf (German language document)
(*): [LH02] I. Linkweiler, L. Humbert. Ergebnisse der Untersuchung zur Eignung einer Programmiersprache fÂur die schnelle Softwareentwicklung â" kann der Informatikunterricht davon
profitieren?, Didaktik der Informatik, UniversitÃt Dortmund, 2002.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
I'm pretty sure a 15-year-old isn't going to want to do "scripting"
Not all 15 year olds are gamers. My first script was for an eggdrop. I also knew several young kids on IRC who scripted for mIRC. Scripting is great because it yields quick results, allows you often to see others code, and gives functional results.
With the ADD world we live in, the investment needed to see results in a 3D graphics world is going to be a hard sell.
I've actually had this experience. I've mentored someone from about 12 - 15. He's going to be one of the best programmers of his generation if he sticks to it.
First, I agree that at this age finding things he wants to do is more important than the specific technology. But I would argue that the technology does matter to some extent. There's a lot of time between 12 and college. Someone who spends a lot of it programming is going to get at least as much experience before college as in college. I'd like to see it go in the right direction. When I taught computer science 111, I sometimes had to tell kids who were self-taught in Basic to forget everything they knew. I'd hate to see that happen to someone who had invested lots of time.
I think it's the job of the mentor to encourage -- with a light enough touch not to discourage -- use of good programming techniques. That means talking about program structure and design, proper data structures, and any other concepts needed for what they're doing. (In my case the kid likes doing multi-threaded network services, so I had to teach him synchronization much earlier than you'd typically do that.)
I haven't programmed in Scheme, so my judgement on it is probably not reliable. I did do a lot of work in Common Lisp. While in many ways I liked Common Lisp more than more recent languages, I think a language like Java or C++ is more likely to push you to think about structure. C++ seems a bit low level. I'd be willing to accept either a high level language like Perl or Python, or something lower level like Java or Visual Basic (using the newer features of the language so that it's essentially the same as Java -- although C# might be a better choice).
For someone who is just going to be playing around there's a lot to be said for Perl/Python. But if they're going to be doing anything big enough where structure matters, I'd probably start with Java or maybe C#. Of course you can certainly start with Python and them move to Java.
In my case, the student I worked with started with Visual Basic, moved into a more structured form of Visual Basic, and then to Java. By now he's also done PHP and C++. It's also all been his choice. And in fact the real answer may be that when working with teenagers unless you want to spoil the fun there's a limit to how much you can or should actually determine what they do. So you may end up supporting them in whatever language they pick. But if someone is likely to be a professional, I'd probably try to get them into a structured language like Java fairly soon for at least some of their work.
And that there my friends is the crux of the problem. This is why we are now swimming in code bloat from every angle. Sorry to disagree with your view of the world, but *proper* programming IS engineering.
Now, to get back on topic, how about something like Squeak? Using squeak land, you can 'trick' the kids into learning a real language. Of course i learned by sitting in front of a 8080 i built from scratch from reading intel data books that i wanted to actually do something other then sit there, but i realize that isnt for everyone.
Python is also be a good starting point. Approachable, and 'legit'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
in fact Lisp itself is built in C
Errr...no. Lisp originally dates back to the late 1950s; C didn't emerge until the early 1970s. The first working Lisp implementation was writtien in IBM 704 machine language; A Lisp compiler (itself implemented in Lisp) was implemented in 1962 - fully 10 years before the birth of C.
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Python is better than Perl because for beginners would takes weeks just to learn all the different possibilities
You don't need to learn them all - you just need to learn ONE to start with, then others can be added as the newbie's level of competence grows. The biggest barrier to programming is a steep learning curve - too much time spent before something tangible can be produced. Any language that lets someone just type stuff, then press "run" is a good start - maybe even Python.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
My understanding is that Alice 3.0 is supposed to fix this, by allowing you to completely eschew the drag-and-drop programming if you want and drop down to the underlying Java. However, I haven't actually tested this, because I've yet to install the beta. Regardless, there seems to be plenty of evidence that Alice 2 can be an effective introduction to programming, particularly for younger and less nerdy students. (My own experience using Alice 2 to introduce high school students to programming supports this.) Even if Alice doesn't teach you what a compiler and linker are, it does teach you about looping, event driven programs, object oriented programming, and many other important programming concepts. I've seen more than a few students go from zero programming experience to a full understanding of the difficulty of implementing collision detection and a physics engine, in the span of a week. In my opinion, getting somebody hooked so quickly that they're ready and motivated to start learning about complex data structures after a week is pretty cool.
I learnt BASIC first, on the Sinclair ZX-81 and then the Sinclar Spectrum.
Soon after that, I learned to program using Turbo Pascal, and I translated a lot of my BASIC programs to Pascal on my Dad's PC.
At school, I learned to program on a BBC Micro using BASIC and 6502 assembler and a little while after that I learned to how to program using 808[86] assembler.
C++ was the next main language I learned to use but between Turbo C++ and Turbo Pascal, I preferred Turbo Pascal, especially how well it managed dependencies and the sheer speed of compilation. I was a very loyal Borland customer, purchasing nearly every version of Turbo/Borland Pascal for DOS (excluding 5.5)...
And then I went pure 32bit programming in 1994 and left the Borland world behind... Used Watcom C++ and Virtual Pascal. Found the GNU compiler. For the last 10+ years, I have almost exclusively been programming using GNU compiler in C and C++.
To answer the poster's question: I would recommend Pascal as a good learning language for learning structured programming.
But to graduate to C and C++ after the basics are well understood and good practices have been learned.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
The point of IntroTo Programming courses is to instill a comprehension and sense of awe at the ability to control the actions, operations, and functions of physical machinery by using symbols, that are non-physical. It is by using your brain to amplify your body (robotics) or by using your brain to build and control a machine that can vastly amplify your brain (a pocket calculator).
Intro To Programming needs to skip language and process at the beginning and first teach how electricity can be used to create and manipulate symbols. This is multi-stage process that teaches how to use electricity to represent binary numbers, then using binary numbers to represent decimal numbers, using decimal to represent CPU instructions, using instructions to make programs, and using programs to control machines that amplify the users physical and mental abilities. And finally, how to use the imagination to create new structures of symbols to create programs.
Install the sense of god-like awe at the ability to manipulate physical reality by rearranging symbols, and the mundane details of language structure are of minor importance to both the student and the teacher.
Seriously.
The best way to learn to program is through social interaction about the subject within a culture dedicated to a wide array of programming topics.
Languages like scheme, lisp, haskel, perl, ruby, python... these are often domain-focused, where it would be hard for the budding programmer to get into some areas of programming that might keep them interrested. For example, graphics or sound.
Languages like C# and VB.NET have a more generalized culture, where you could get into just about anything and actualy find other people doing the same stuff via online forums (in the old days it was through BBS's and FidoNet.)
So I recommend a general language, without much meaningfull limitations, that has one or more high traffic public forums online dedicated to it.
"His name was James Damore."
Programming in Scratch helps kids
During the directed learning that takes place in a Scratch-oriented curriculum, the teaching team can introduce another programming language to show how syntax-oriented programming languages can perform the same tasks as the graphics-oriented systems. Any programming language can serve as that second language.
I find it a bit ironic that the best language for teaching programming languages isn't a language at all.
If your young, you probably just want to make games. I'd recommend game maker...it starts out as drag and drop so that you can learn the basics, but easily extends into its coding language, which is similar to Java, but much easier to use!
Best second language is assembler. To learn to understand what that first language is actually doing.
what we do is craftmanship, not engineering
Sometimes I consider the best programs as works of art too.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Scheme isn't remotely write-only - instead it changes how one thinks about programming for the better. If you really want to see write-only, let me introduce you to my good friend perl without strictures.
Most of the people posting here really haven't grasped (1) and (2).
Assembly as a first language is ridiculous, yet so many are arguing for it.
Not only is it irrelevant today apart from microcontrollers, which they might get a job programming in 10-15 years time (assuming they're young now), but it will be incredibly frustrating.
The student has to come to the decision to use C, Assembler, etc, themselves, when they decide they have to in order to realise their vision for whatever they're programming. I.e., they're not beginners any more.
In the 80s that would mean writing your game in BASIC, and then finding that performance sucked. You'd extend BASIC with some extensions you found in a magazine or bought (e.g., Sprites Alive! on the Amstrad CPC) to see if that would help, and it would for the first few projects.
What's the modern equivalent? They've already done their MySpace profile, and so on. Maybe they've done basic HTML and CSS by themselves. Now they want to go further ... or write games online? So is Flash the answer? Java for applets, despite the massive initial learning barrier (shared by most of the languages being recommended in this story)? Or do you scrape them away from the web and onto RealBasic, especially if they look at PHP, ugh.
I would add in (2a) ability to get quick results, however primitive they are. 10 INPUT "What's your name? "; a$: Print a$ + " is a fag!" : REM: Instant fun.
I agree with (4) but it shouldn't be overriding.
Also many young people will never get turned on by programming, whatever you do. Maybe you should get them into repairing cars, or building things, or whatever. Or disown them.
Start them with Objects... I had a hard time getting into OO programming because I started with a very low level language.
I started on Fortran. It was horrible. Then I got a home computer with BASIC and advanced to assembly language.
25 years later, I still am at the assembly language stage for programming. But I use different processors and tools. The language is not as important as the tools that support that language. Visual BASIC is great because it gives a simple easy-to-use way to create programs in a Windows environment. Its structural limitations are irrelevant. It is the cost and sophistication of the development tools that is more important.
Now that you can buy a microcontroller for $1.50 that has more power than the original IBM PC, development tools like IDEs are the most important consideration. Computer science was important when computers cost a million dollars: it is meaningless today when they cost a few dollars.
I detest C because I can't debug it on the IDE that controls my $1.50 microcontroller. I can read it and write it fine. I can work with it fine. But I hate it because it's too abstract. I have no idea of what exactly the CPU is doing.
OOP is just science fiction; it's advantages are imaginary. If your application is so advanced and complex that you need OOP to create a program to do it, then it's time to completely rethink the idea of what a computer does.
Computer science is the process of reconfiguring complex concepts to fit into the limitations of the machine. Computer science becomes irreverent when you realize that the more complex the problem, the easier it is to solve by redesigning the computer to fit the problem. Not reducing the problem into small enough processes that will fit into the machine.
It is cheaper and faster to design a custom arrangement of 1000 $1.50 microprocessors to match the needs of complex problem than it is to write and debug the software that will 'solve' the problem on a $5000 standard Von Neumann computer. Microcontroller programmers are cheap and easy to recruit: OOP software development teams are expensive.
This is the new reality of the 21st-century. OOP is the last gasp of the 'big iron' boys.
Turbo Pascal
What a bloody nightmare. I learned Pascal in high school. Two years later when I learned C, I found myself wondering why the fuck anyone would inflict Pascal on people trying to learn programming. I later ended up maintaining a piece of business software written in Turbo Pascal (and later, stuff written in fucking Delphi) and found myself entertaining fantasies of building a time machine and choking Anders Hejlsberg to death in his bed in 1980 before he could inflict his monstrosity on the world.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
a good programmer should know all the chain, from Java/Python/Scheme/Whatever down to the machine code.
Yes, but you don't start with assembly language. You start with something conceptually simple, like Python. I started with Basic on the Commodore 64. Before a year was up, I was doing shit in 6502 assembly because interpreted Basic was too slow. Not a chance in hell I could've picked up assembly straight off without some understanding of a higher level language. Throwing assembly at someone is like throwing a pile of parts and fasteners at someone and telling them to build a combine harvester.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Personally I would recommend C++ or Fortran since that should quickly kill their interest in programming. And I really don't want more competition from bright young people.
They are new programmers.
If they want to understand the logic of computers, then they should write pseudo code first.
Do this until they are not new programmers.
After all, how can you start programming in another language before you've even got your editor configured?!
That (and some of the stuff in your link) is about all we agree on. I read you comment and I know EXACTLY your type.
Stop.
You really think you know my type? You, just like every of your type, have it in your head that everyone has a a great desire to be just like them, or to do what they do.
Honestly, I really don't. I have no desire to be like you at all. Like, I don't need to have people beneath me to affirm myself. I don't need to have power to be satisfied with what I have done. I have myself, my two hands, and my mind, and I do not want what you have and I don't need you.
Its your shit attitude and likely awkward personality.
Stop.
Careerwise, I have no desire to move up any "ladder" at all. With the internet, who really needs a ladder. If I can write a program that sells or a web site that gets hits,
while men in 3 pc suits, according to your skewed perception, seem to do nothing and make loads and take nice long vacation
First off, I have no problem with the guy in the three piece suit that can actually sell a product or a project. Those people are worth their weight in gold, and they deserve every cent. I mean, take a look at Alan Mullaly. This guy was the CEO of Boeing and his job was to walk into a room, press the flesh, wine and dine do whatever it took to convince some other guys to write him a check for billions of dollars for his jet aircraft, over someone elses. Now he is going around to dealers all over the country trying to convince people to buy his cars over everyone else's. Who care if the guy gets paid 50M a year or even a 100M a year when he is one of the handful of people on the planet that can turnaround and sell hundreds of billions of dollars worth of stuff. That's chump change to pay the guy, and there's not that many like him that he is replacable.
But most MBAs can't sell. So.. the whole supposed gift of customer communication that they have is really so much of a distortion. Either you can bring home the contracts, or, you aren't any better at communicating than the developers who work for you, no matter what you wear.
My advice to you would be to always tell the truth, because I don't think people like you do.
By telling the truth, I mean that, in your communications, you convey an accurate impression of a situation to the stakeholders. Spin is lying. Leaving out something, is lying. Communicating one motivation that makes logical sense while pursuing another is lying.
Like, I just had one guy go and explain to the client in an awfully written email just how much work they did in this little area, very self promotional, but left out the very material fact that all of that work was rather a small and unimportant part of a much larger problem that they had not solved... which I did.
consider the dumbest person using the software, put yourself in their shoes, and design the thing
Stop.
The fact of the matter is, most managers do not care about user interfaces or the users at all. Most people like you see projects and consumers as stepping stones, a mountain of people to be walked up as you go up the ladder. Are there programmers that do not care about user interface? Sure, probably are. But, there's as many managers that drive shortcuts, sweep problems under the table, misrepresent the success of a particular user interface design, hide obvious usability problems, and so on, and then turn around and blame the customer.
But again my long term success is based on myself. If I can write something on the internet that people are interested in purchasing, or reading sufficiently, then that's great and I can achieve an independent life. But if not then, I can still contentedly work on as a senior developer knowing that, I gave life my best shot trying to achieve what I wanted to achieve, and maybe I just wasn't good enough. It's the opportunity that I've been given by God and Country that I'm grateful for, and I don't need or expect anything more.
This is my sig.
For saying this, but the answer is right there is you RTFS....Good old VB6. The VB6 IDE was nothing if not simple, you drag and drop whatever elements you wanted, go "clicky clicky" to bring bring up code view and really butt simple for making little apps. Once the kids have gotten to make their own programs for awhile THEN you can move them up to more complex languages. But nothing excites a kid more than "I made this!" and VB6 is nothing if not simple to make little apps.
And their are plenty of places like vb6.us and a1vbcode and find tons of heavily commented code snippets to show them how to make anything from a little GUI for keeping up with videos to slot machines. And with VB6 it is beyond simple to play with code like that and see what makes it tick.
So while a lot of the "real programmers" will be screaming bloody murder because I dared to bring up old VB6, the simple fact is it is really good at the niches it was designed for. It is really good at cranking off an app quickly and it is really easy to get started with. Both are requisites IMHO for teaching kids programming. After all, if they can't see that they can make the PC "do stuff" pretty quickly they are gonna get bored and not want to continue long before they get to the good stuff. And with VB6 you can have it popping off little message boxes and other little tricks within the first hour of picking it up.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Re performance, you're describing algorithms.
I've programmed for 27 years, in a great many languages, starting with BASIC and several assembly languages at the beginning.
Honestly, I didn't learn properly about algorithms and algorithmic complexity until I had the chance to learn higher level languages, which weren't available on home computers when I started.
I *did* learn a lot about raw efficiency, from counting cycles and memory accesses and instructions; things like that. I learned how to write really fast graphics routines, and clever ways to squeeze the most out of a limited machine.
But learning that O(n log n) is the fastest you can do a sort and that it's worth it? How to do malloc efficiently and when to use a specialised allocator? When to use a balanced tree structure? When to use hash tables, or compare digests? When to cache things?
That sort of thing started for me with higher level languages, starting with Orwell (a precursor to Haskell), Lisp and C. And with university.
You don't learn about algorithms just by writing assembly language. Conversely, you do learn about algorithms by reading good tutorials which use clear languages like pseudo-code or Python to explain them.
So I do advocate some knowledge of assembly language for a feel for what's going on underneath. It's very useful, especially in teaching about memory. ;-)
(I'd advocate hardware compilation, but it's not quite accessible enough yet
But it's important to understand algorithms and to know about many classic ones, and how to put them together to make new ones. That's far easier with higher level languages.
Good algorithms written in Perl beat bad algorithms written in assembly language, or even compiled directly into hardware.
A practical and theoretical knowledge of algorithms and raw performance, now that is a great combination if you can teach it :-)
But then beware of becoming someone who can't resist writing fast code when the speed of writing the code itself, and it's clarity to other people afterwards, is more important than it's performance... Knowing when to write for other criteria, such as clarity, and how to do that well, is a very important skill indeed.