Slashdot Mirror
Learning Programming In a Post-BASIC World
ErichTheRed writes "This Computerworld piece actually got me thinking — it basically says that there are few good 'starter languages' to get students interested in programming. I remember hacking away at BASIC incessantly when I was a kid, and it taught me a lot about logic and computers in general. Has the level of abstraction in computer systems reached a point where beginners can't just code something quick without a huge amount of back-story? I find this to be the case now; scripting languages are good, but limited in what you can do... and GUI creation requires students to be familiar with a lot of concepts (event handling, etc.) that aren't intuitive for beginners. What would you show a beginner first — JavaScript? Python? How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"
And why doesnt BASIC still work? Any reason they can't still use BASIC?
It's lightweight, portable, and has a ton of interesting projects for learning. Start here at http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ Check out the "Try Ruby in Your Browser link" on the right hand side.
Agile Artisans
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/08/07/22/0452225/How-To-Encourage-a-Young-Teen-To-Learn-Programming
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/07/30/2150208/How-Should-a-Non-Techie-Learn-Programming
Someone should keep track of them. Maybe stash them in some "Learn to Program" folder on Slashdot?
I'd say go for the JavaScript. The learner already has the instant gratification of an HTML document. Then add a button whose onclick handler changes the button's value to "Hello World".
How is event handling unintuitive? "When this happens, do this and this and this."
Palm trees and 8
http://processing.org/ it's easy and gives immediate gratification.
It all starts at 0
Google it. Especially if you like the Sims, try the 3.0 beta. Other than that I'd second HTML + Javascript. You can very quickly get up an running with something fun and interesting.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The only thing it will do for you is give you serious brain damage. Python is widely recommended as a good starter language that is also good as a serious language. Following from that you can easily branch to Perl, Ruby, Haskell, even C (which I recommend learning after Python if you can).
I recently heard (though not used) about Alice, which sounds interesting for at least introducing programming concepts.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
God no. Visual basic is a very syntax sensitive language with huge libraries. It is like the anti-beginner language. Even microsoft's other major .NET offering(C#) is better.
My reccomendation is python, with a lean towards using graphics libraries like vpython. Being able to go mysphere=sphere() is glorioiusly simple and have it show up in 3d is grand.
Python has the following features that are great for learning:
interactive debugger- type your program line by and and see what each line does.
english-like syntax(except elif). As much as possible, python is designed to be written as it would be read out loud. eg: for item in array: print item
at the language level, absolutely no machine restrictions. Integers can get as big as your ram, no pointer math,
It's almost certainly the best choice.
"How do you get the instant gratification we oldies got when sitting down in front of the early-80s home computers?"
By using a language that has lasted through that time to this one: Fortran.
Fortran is still one of the most widely used languages in scientific applications, and is a great starting point for beginners.
It's not about wonder its about learning the basics.
If you want fun and wonder teach the kids Pygame.
When I was a kid, the computer i programmed for (trs-80), was one of the first computer I ever saw. There were not that many programs for it. So it was easy to get excited about almost nothing.
Now all the kids have been exposed to all sort of technologies. They'll never get excited by very simple things like I have been. The thing to remember is that it will never be has rewarding has it was at the time for such simple things and no language is going to change that.
If anything, the post-BASIC world is far, far, better supplied with both explicitly pedagogical languages, application-specific rapid development tools(Processing, for instance), and fairly mature options that allow you to do anything from what is essentially shell scripting to full application development.
However, you run into the rather messy problem that off-the-shelf examples of software have(both in terms of software complexity and in terms of ancillary stuff like graphics and sound assets) Vastly increased in number, sophistication, and availability. This makes it harder to engage any would-be-learner who isn't explicitly interested in programming by sucking them in with the cool results.
Back when daddy borrowed the company Compaq Luggable so that he could work on spreadsheets on weekends, your choices for computer entertainment were pretty much "Lotus 1-2-3" or "Make your own damn fun with basic". Option two was pretty attractive even if you really just wanted some games and only became interested in what made them tick later.
Nowadays, when we have all removed the onions from our belts, hypothetical kiddo is enormously better tools and documentation at his/her fingertips; but is also comparing the rudimentary results of a beginner against products of 2-3 years of effort by a professional design team, backed by artists and sound guys, available for 20-50 bucks off the shelf. Even the sort of flash games that will load about as quickly as the Python 3.2 reference manual will are comparatively polished and intimidating.
Arguably, it might actually be better to start beginners out with more physical projects: Sure, robotics has also increased enormously in sophistication and power; but high end robots are still expensive and uncommon, and there is a more visceral "wow" factor to "Hey, I hammered out the feedback logic that allows my little *duio bot to follow lines" than there is to "Oh, I've just produced 10% of Zork; but less witty and 25 years late. Let's go play Medal of Life Half-Gear Assault 2011."
Grab a TI calculator. Learn the slightly weird version of BASIC installed on them. That's where I got my start.
You can write an actually useful program in just a few lines. It's got a few simple data types (floats, strings, lists and matrices), has a few basic functions (Disp, Input), and all the common language constructs (If-Then-Else, For, While, Goto). There's a few oddities (assignment is reversed, instead of "a = 2" you have "2 -> a"), and there's no proper way to declare a function (you can either make another program and call it, or use goto), but you can do a surprising amount with it.
I programmed those for a year or so. Tried learning assembly to get around the limits of Basic (mostly the speed), couldn't do it. But I did get into C++, and later all the other "real" languages, and am now pretty much a real programmer.
Are you implying that my habit of using "elif" in natural-language conversation may be marking me out as some sort of deviant geek weirdo?
I learned BASIC first. When I was shown LOGO, I wrote a few lines of code to draw a Sierpinski triangle, and thought to myself: there is no fucking way this can be this simple. It worked, though, and sure got me to appreciate the weird academic languages.
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
A kid who isn't satisfied with very basic accomplishments is one who will never have a shot at writing a 3D game. I had to explain this to a younger guy the hard way a few weeks ago. It requires real work, drive and willingness to learn. If you can't delay gratification or find gratification in simple accomplishments along the way, you're not even a candidate for success.
MIT's Scratch ( http://scratch.mit.edu/ ) has gotten my kids started with programming. It's fun, and teaches all the fundamentals necessary for learning programming logic.
I too started with basic in middle school but it did not teach me much. In high school we did fortran, which taught me mad skills, then I taught myself C and C++. I still think C is important for people who want to do serious programming as it does not have the cruches of the other languages, is simple enough to be put in a two hundred page book, and will teach everything one needs to know about debugging and basic design.
In terms of instant gratification, I would suggest writing web apps in python. Most of the GUI stuff is taken care of by the browser, Python takes care of parameter passing to and from the user, and one can teach all the concepts, aside form parralel programming. A kid can write any number of games and if one has access to a web server, it can be run anywhere there is internet access. Such a thing can be great motivational tool.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
You should definitely look at Scratch, which is designed for kids, even (especially?) kids who don't type very well yet, yet it teaches them programming skills. This is the same crowd who initially did Logo all those years ago, and they think this is better...
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
Python is not a good solution. Especailly if you are worried about syntax sensitivity as your parent poster was. Sure white space is a good thing to organize your code, but the actual execution of your program shouldn't be changed by the lack of whitespace. Python is a pretty good language overall, but forcing beginners to understand that whitespace makes a difference in how something executes is asking for trouble.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've been teaching some kids how to program simple games using Python and the Pygame module (wrapper for SDL) with some success.
One problem I've noticed is that the kids aren't all that interested in programming the simple exercises, such as the "guess the number" game or programs that generate simple ascii art -- all stuff that was exciting to program in BASIC back in the day. I had a promising 12 year old student who was making good progress and had successfully made (with help) a side-view tank shoot-em-up game with two players. Guess what he wanted to do for his second project?... a StarCraft clone.
He was able to produce a random ground texture and to control a single "dot" to move where he wanted it via mouse clicks, and then he bogged down. He gave it a good try but the project was a bit too complex to provide easy progress.
I need to come up with some simpler project ideas that are still fun to create.
Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
For anyone suggesting VB, or Visual C#, or any of the other "Click to build the framework then fill in the back end", this is the worst possible thing an actual beginning programmer should be looking into.
I would assume from the OP that we're talking about people with no programming background. Taking someone like that, giving them a button to click to generate a UI, then having them fill in the blanks is #fail. They don't already know how to program. It would be like asking someone to complete a puzzle, in a dark room, where they don't know what shape the blanks are in the puzzle, or what colors they should be, or even where the front or the back is.
Interface builders are nice for people that already know how to program, because while creating UI's is tedious, it's also about the 10th thing to be done when building a program. People who have been programming for years can work backwards (Yes, UI to logic is backwards in all cases except for programmers-who-specifically-design-UIs, but that's not what we're talking about here) from the UI to the underlying program logic and the flows between UI elements, but someone new shouldn't be developing in this direction. They should be understanding how the logic behind the program works, in many different variations, before they go putting a pretty button in front of that logic to show the result in pretty graphical ways via some rendering library call..
BASIC, Lisp, Perl, Python, Java (not javaw or AWT), all are useful for the basic understanding of what a program is, what control and input and output logic is. As people have mentioned, Python and Java both have graphical toolkit extensions that can eventually extend your development to pretty pictures and not input/logic/output. If you really want some sort of "visual" developer to put in front of this person, go look into some of the "Blocks" development tools, like Google AppInventor, for example. These use interfaces analogous to puzzle pieces to represent the code in the application, and you can drag and drop inputs and outputs to hook into control statements to do things - sorta like the virtual programming equivalent of everyone's favorite Radio Shack 160-in-1 Electronics kit.
For the love of god, though - don't "teach" someone to program by putting them in front of a framework generator and having them "go at it".
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
Huh? Why? I don't use Python, but I just don't see any basis for your assertion. Whitespace is how we arrange natural languages when written, so why not programming languages? It's perfectly intuitive, especially to visual thinkers.
I'd recommend Brainfuck. It has no library at all to confuse beginners and only 8 commands.
Python, Perl, Lisp, Scheme, BASIC, Java, JavaScript, shell... it doesn't matter. Pick up whatever feels most comfortable, or whatever tool is most readily available. Learn the basics of flow control, data structures, and the most fundamental algorithms. Learn how to debug, document, log, build, install and maintain.
Once you've mastered these basics, move immediately to C (not C++). Programming in C will teach you what it is that you're actually doing in that high level language, and force you to manage everything that you want to do. You don't just instantiate a new class to get a thread or forget about that variable's storage when you're done with it. You have to think about the details and understand them, and even if your entire career is spent writing Python, you still need to understand these things. I'd recommend assembly, but there's a lot more well documented sample code in C to work from, and getting larger projects done in C is still practical, if somewhat painful.
Once C is something you're comfortable with, trying out C++ is an excellent next step, but that's probably best determined by what you want to / have to work on.
Whitespace is how we arrange natural languages when written
If I resize my browser window so that your post linebreaks at "when written" instead of "especially to", the meaning of your post doesn't change.
Ruby.
Kind of surprised it's not getting more love here.
(hey, not everyone's into the Python philosophy)
sic transit gloria mundi
What I find amusing is how completely Pascal has disappeared from both historical memory and current usage. Some of you may remember the 80s for Basic on a C64, but I remember a huge bandwagon for Pascal both as a teaching language and as a working language. (I am not advocating Pascal, just reminiscing.)
and that's where you're wrong. the initial question IS about wonder. I started messing with BASIC to make simple games on my C128 when I was 8. TFA is talking about kids.
what would you teach an 8 year old to do with bash?
I think that as long as you avoid BASH-like "fi" and "esac", you're probably safe.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
How about starting with assembler?
http://altdevblogaday.org/2011/03/24/machine-code-is-for-kids/
Mada mada dane.
I would add Java. The Java haters will hate but Sun created a great set of tutorials to teach people how to use Java and they are still available on the web. Eclipse.org and Netbeans are great free IDEs that you can download. I would also suggest Squeak. If you are on the mac Objective C is available but may be a bit much for people just getting started. You also have Ruby, Perl, and Free Pascal which is really a good choice as well.
Of course you could go with the real replacement for Basic.
PHP!
Easy to use and abuse and will do nothing to teach you good programing skills just like basic.
Truth is that back in the C-64,Apple II, TRS-80, 99/4a, Atari 800/400, Coco, and Sinclair days we all used Basic because that is what we had. Some times you could find an Assembler or believe it or not a machine language monitor but real programing languages where expensive and hard to come by. I was so excited when a friend gave me a copy of COMAL. Now you can get just about any language you want.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ithinkthatmaybeonlypartiallytrue.
Certainly by the time you're dealing with paragraphs and multiple sentences, whitespace actually does become significant.
I've never been a fan of whitespace being syntactically significant in a language, and my only exposure to Python was almost a decade ago ... that was enough to make me cringe. But, that could have been the guy writing it the code that I saw. But, it was complete crap and pretty much soured me on the entire language.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
That is not entirely true. We have many 'whitespace' rules in written language. Like leaving a space between words, after periods or commas, etc. So in effect it is a combination of punctuation and whitespace. Many programming languages use punctuation as well, but not usually in the way written language does or at least not the same types (ending 'lines' in C++ with ; for instance).
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
http://smallbasic.com/
As somebody who writes Python professionally, I'm a bit biased, but can say with some assurance that the whitespace thing is not a major problem in the Real World. It's certainly no more of a problem than any other technique for designating a code block.
Compare these:
' Basic
If a == b Then
do_something()
EndIf
/* C and relatives */
if (a==b) {
do_something()
}
; LISP and friends
(if (== a b)
(do_something))
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
Are you seriously suggesting that the last one is more confusing than the others? If your blocks are large enough that they can't easily fit on a screenful, you have other problems not related to your language of choice.
There are things to go after Python for, but whitespace is definitely not one of them. My take on its strength as a teaching language is that it can do really simple beginner stuff and really advanced stuff with graphics and sound (with the right libraries installed).
I am officially gone from
Microsoft Small Basic
It's the best learning tool I've found so far -- it's simple and has an excellent help system. The auto complete has descriptions along side the text (encouraging exploration and discovery), the sidebar help automatically displays help for the current command, and the PDF tutorial is well-designed and simple enough for a bright child to understand.
Some of the changes are a bit odd, but they make sense. Next has been replaced by EndFor, for example, but this does keep things consistent with EndIf, EndWhile, etc.
The program itself is small (6mb download) and incredibly simple -- no weird options or anything to get in the way. It actually makes tools like Scratch look complicated!
Microsoft actually did this one right. I give it my full endorsement.
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'd recommend a compiled language with exception handling. I feel that makes it a little harder to get stuck/frustrated without any clues. The compiler keeps syntax in check. Exception handling gives a better clue as to why something is failing at run time. Of the major languages, I'd take either Java or c#. Eclipse or VS express, both solid and free IDEs. There are also tons of structured "learn this language" tutorials. Most also start with console apps which are a good place to start. I'd lean towards VS because I prefer visual studio. But from the academic value point of view, I don't see any notable difference between c# and java for the beginner. Obviously you'd go for Java if you're on a mac though.
Contrast that against something like javascript. It can be damn near frustrating trying to understand the DOM, the CSS inheritance, etc. That and simple syntax errors can prevent methods from loading, etc. Sometimes too much simplicity leaves a beginner without any sort of help. That doesn't even touch on browser compatibility.
I'd start with one of two options: Web programming or physical devices. Either one lets you make pretty simple programs that actually DO SOMETHING.
For web, I'd obviously start with HTML/Javascript, then go into PHP. Or maybe skip Javascript at first, as it's a huge pain to debug. Point is, you can build something with a nice pretty GUI pretty quickly and easily, and PHP and Javascript will prepare you well (in terms of basic concepts and syntax) for more advanced languages like C or Java.
The other way to go -- the way I really went -- is to start with programming physical devices. I started with Lego Mindstorms -- you start with their programming language (drag-and-drop stuff), but that quickly becomes too basic, so you start looking into things like NQC -- basically a C variant that has a rather limited instruction set, specifically designed for the Lego microcomputer. It's a bit hard to learn on your own (I still remember asking for help with my first program -- "You need semicolons!" "...I do? Where?"), but if you actually read the tutorials or have someone to help you with it, it isn't too bad, and you can immediately see what it's doing. Something like an Arduino could also work, though it may be too complicated. I'm only familiar with the TI MSP430 Launchpad stuff, which is similar in design, but would be way too difficult for a beginner....but I gather that the Arduino has some easier programming tools.
My immeadiate reaction to this article was Python. However there is a fun language out there that gives a lot of bang for your typing called "Processing" it's targeted at artists and rank amateurs. It won't get you a cool prgramming job, (maybe I'm wrong), but it will get you programming with a small language and easy to learn libraries. Lots of examples are included in the compiler download. http://processing.org/ [processing.org]
A teenager I'm acquainted with has been geeking-out with http://www.qb64.net/ for several years. It seems to fill the niche that C-64 BASIC did for me and MS-BASIC and QBasic did for slightly younger geeks.
My kids don't mind programming. They both used Alice http://alice.org/ and were meh about it and didn't go back (about two years ago).
They both like Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu and the 12 year old has moved on to building his own blocks in the Squeak interface underneath it -- so as a starter language I think it has done exactly what we'd like it to do. He's now looking forward to learning python, probably using the media computation materials from Guzdial/Ericson.
The 9 year old actually prefers Microsoft's Kodu http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/.
I'm thinking about working them through some of the material at Bootstrap http://www.bootstrapworld.org/ which is teachScheme for kids.
Once you get over your white space phobia and brainwashing imposed by other languages and closed minded programmers, you'll actually learn to love python's white space scoping.
I used to be one of those brain-dead space haters, too. Now ever since I first saw the light, my language of choice has been WhiteSpace and I've never looked back.
If you format nicely, sure, that's true enough, and while I'm a fan of teaching proper indentation, your examples are technically incorrect (the best kind of incorrect!).
Your code in BASIC:
' Basic
If a == b Then
do_something()
EndIf
Functions identically if you do this:
' Basic
If a == b Then
do_something()
EndIf
Or even this:
' Basic
If a == b Then
do_something()
EndIf
However, in Python, I believe this:
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
is not identical to this:
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
or more specifically, not identical to this:
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
And even if that is functionally identical (due to the brevity of the snippet), a larger structure which requires varying levels of indentation would not be. This would, admittedly, be painful to look at from an experienced programmer's point of view, but having no indentation is how I remember learning to write in BASIC the first time (since line numbers and explicit structure end syntax controlled flow anyway).
That all said, from what I know of it (and I've only briefly used it several years back, so my knowledge may be out of date or mis-remembered), I'm in favor of Python as a learning language (and a language in general), but I can see the potential concerns for teaching if one doesn't expect the student to be able to maintain perfect (or even good) indentation formatting for some reason. Having explicit non-whitespace characters control program flow might be slightly easier for a new programmer to understand -- and using an editor that automatically indents code based on those characters would help them understand good formatting (along with helping them see the code structure form as they write), and enable them to transition quickly to Python later, where you're essentially just dropping the explicit curly braces in favor of implicit ones using indentation.
~Anguirel (lit. Living Star-Iron)
QA: The art of telling someone that their baby is ugly without getting punched.
The "back-story" was always there, unless you go back to the 1940s or something. The BASIC programmer of 1981 didn't think about things like how does PRINT really work, the garbage collection that kept string variable storage from growing to infinity, etc. The abstraction and (temporary?) ignorance of the back-story is what lets you "just code something quick."
I think the reason things "feel" different now, is just that the back-story is longer and the abstractions are higher. When the 1981 BASIC programmer decided to dig deeper, it wasn't very long before he was working in assembly language, whereas when the 2011 Python programmer digs deeper, he's reading the source code to the library (most of which is itself written in Python) or maybe down in C and learning the OS' API calls. It's a deeper dig before you're thinking about transistors, but I'm not sure that's really important. You've got to start somewhere and really no matter where that is, you're going to start learning new things if you're interested.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
DarkBasic Pro doesn't have line numbers. DOES have functions. Add-on libraries. It's compiled, free, and high on the instant gratification scale. With a bit of work, (less than just about any other language I can think of off hand,) it can be used to create games that contemporary kids would actually recognize as the sort of games they play.
Back in the day I learned a lot from programming Hypertalk (Hypercard) on my parent's Mac LC. Despite the somewhat heavy syntax sugar, it really let you do a lot with very little, and all of that sugar meant that you could figure out what is going on by simply looking at the code. I'm still annoyed at Apple when they started shipping the player instead of the full development environment, and when they eventually dropped it entirely. The code is still around, but it's wildly overpriced for kids and example code is much harder to find.
Still, the ability to put a button on the screen, and then pull up the code in the button to find:
on mouseUp
ask "Please enter a number"
put it into theNumber
answer "You entered " theNumber
end mouseUp
That's the sort of thing you can build off of very easily.
I read the internet for the articles.
ARM is supposed to have a pretty clean instruction set, so maybe even use ARM instead of an old 8 bit micro. x86 is ugly-- as a beginner, would stay away from it.
Um, ARMs may have a "clean" instruction set; but it is NOT designed for humans to code in!
I cut my teeth on 6502 assembler and Integer BASIC on the Apple 1 and Apple ][, and I am here to tell you that the 6502 is, hands-down, the easiest CPU to code Assembler in (6800 being a close, and somewhat related, second).
My suggestion would be to find a good Apple ][ emulator (I think that machine has been emulated on virtually (haha) every single platform). And with the speeds of modern CPUs, it is WAY easy to emulate at, or even well beyond, "bare metal" speeds. Heck, you could probably code an Apple ][ emulation in an INTERPRETED language on today's computers!
But serously, having coded for a wide variety of 8 bit personal computers, and an even wider variety of 8/16/32 bit microprocessors and microcontrollers, I still enjoyed coding on the 6502 more than any other micro, hands-down.
I do believe in the basic (haha) premise that you should learn assembler first, otherwise, the CPU is too much of a "black box", and you never develop a true understanding of the low-level stuff that is going on. And BASIC, and particularly a character-based, interpreted BASIC, is the best for learning program flow, logic control, and (yes you CAN do it in BASIC) good program design.
Turbo Pascal on the IBM PC worked extremely well and was cheap enough for everyone to afford. It was a killer-app all on its own. I don't even remember a C compiler being offered in the early days of the PC. And I don't know why there wasnt one. But all the Microsoft development kit was expensive except for the assembler.
if a == b: do_something()
Doesn't work.
Python 2.7.1 (r271:86832, Nov 27 2010, 17:19:03) [MSC v.1500 64 bit (AMD64)] on
...
win32
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> if 1 + 1 == 2: print "yes"
yes
>>>
If you want instant gratification and know how to code then you can call into C libraries with one-liners.
If you don't know any programming at all then there's a whole series for you too.
And if you write PHP then imagine what it'd be like without the bad hangovers from v3-4, with all the planned improvements from the 6.0 they abandoned, and with functions that use a consistent needle-haystack order everywhere.
And the execution of your C program shouldn't be changed by the lack of curly braces... See, I can make dumbshit statements also.
Python is a pretty good language overall, but forcing beginners to understand that whitespace makes a difference in how something executes is asking for trouble.
Even a computer-illiterate person can usually understand the concept of bullet points which have sub-bullets and possible sub-sub-bullets, and they "get" that the sublevels are encompassed by and related to the higher levels. They're non-programmers, it doesn't mean they're idiots.
or more specifically, not identical to this:
# Python
if a==b:
do_something()
That is not permitted in Python. It is a syntax error. You must either list a statement on the same line, or begin an indented block. If you want an empty block, you use the 'pass' statement. See, it's almost as if there are features designed into the syntax to help prevent mistakes. How odd.
As someone who learnt it as a first language, java is a horrible first language. Just look at Java's hello world (it's about eight lines, one of which starts "public static void main") - it's intimidating as hell compared to something like python ("print 'hello world'"). Java forces you to understand the notion of classes from the get-go (or cargo-cult a bunch of arbitrary crap before and after your actual program), which is a whole load of trouble you don't need when you're learning basic concepts like a for loop. And that's without even going into the lack of an interpreter or first-class functions.
I am trolling
Oh god, this.
Years ago I got into a bit of a row with a co-worker. He liked two space tabs, and insisted on using emacs, which is fine ... except emacs replaced a series of tabs with a single tab (or something) that it interpreted as needing to be indented according to its own rules. But left the file unusable for everyone else because they weren't privy to these fancy rules, they were just text editors.
Basically, every commit he made looked like the entire fscking file had changed. It took days for him to understand that I don't care if he sees tabs as 2, 4, or 8 chars ... but if he couldn't make the resulting output something which I could still edit in vi or every other editor we used, I was going to lock him out of CVS. Because once the file had been edited in emacs, it was fucked up for anybody not using emacs. When the display preferences of your editor start to affect other things, it's bad -- you can't break it for the lowest common editor just so you can have syntax highlighting in emacs. He didn't seem to understand that I wasn't complaining about his visual preferences, I was complaining about what it was doing to the actual source files.
I'm not sure I agree with your arguments in favor of whitespace being syntactically meaningful (I personally think it's stupid) ... but, the amount that I code has dwindled over the years, and it is what it is. My exposure to Python a bunch of years ago left me with a very bad impression of it as a language as it seemed to rely on/advocate some really poor coding choices that when carried into a different language made for absolute shit code -- C does not benefit from that kind of layout, in fact, it becomes absolute crap.
(Actually, I vaguely remember letting someone else go who wouldn't adhere to our coding standards ... he didn't seem to understand that it wasn't his own personal code base, and that far more than just him was affected by his choices. He seemed to think that I was stifling his creativity, as opposed to protecting the integrity of a huge code base which had been around for some years and represented the product as built by people far smarter. No great loss, he was fairly useless anyway.)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.