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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the average case for new programmers looking to hack something is to start out building a solar powered aquafarm. It's better to teach the fundamentals first, which are easy enough to pick up from Javascript. Most programming courses start with something easy like Java, Python or Pascal for exactly this reason. Then later if they want to complete a more advanced project, they can pick up low level coding - it's not much of a leap, despite how fawny and melodramatic people get over coding in C/assembly/whatever.

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C/assembly are great starters because they teach you how computers actually work.

Even a simple function in JS taking one variable abstracts a good deal of that away from you because it handles things like memory allocation for you.

A lot of modern hopeful programmers that make it into our interviews can barely explain what the new keyword of a OOP language actually does, and way too many have no idea what a stack is.

This isn’t useful when you write CRUD web-applications for a few thousands users, which is arguably a lot of modern programming is, but it’s extremely useful if you ever want to build something original.

Which is actually the key issue. You seem to think building a water pump isn’t a beginner project, but why isn’t it? It’s one of the most basic programs you could write. In fact it’s so basic that you could solve it mechanically, without the use of programming, if you have running water to power the timed open close mechanism of the pump and pull the water.

By contrast, a web site is infinitely more complex. Only you think it isn’t, because other programmers have build most of your tools for you. Which is great, you should stand on the shoulder if giants every time you can. What isn’t going to be great is when you’re tasked with solving a problem no one has solved for you first.

for the vast majority of modern projects, you don't need the performance that manual memory management provides. I would bet that 90%+ of modern software is written in a memory-managed language. If you need to leap from JS to C, it's really not that hard. But trying to learn about stack frame allocation and RAII and cache line optimisation is a lot to take on when you've just learned what a variable is.

The abstractions are what's important, memory layout is an implementation detail. Even when you're writing C or assembly, you're still thinking in terms of data flow and logic, you're just having to do a lot of the work manually. Learning the abstractions without the baggage of the implementation detail will get 90% of people 90% of the way. Once you have that solid foundation, you can go on to learn assembly or C if you need it because it's not that big a leap from a coding mindset to a hardware control mindset. But to go straight from no coding experience to hardware control is going to be more difficult for a new student to wrap their head around.

I think you misunderstood me. It’s not the abstraction that’s important. It’s the problem solving that comes with knowing how the understanding.

How can you really be tasked with solving problems if your first response is to look for a node package that does it for you? And that’s what JavaScript teaches you.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t use node packages. But learning to do that as your first steps into programming is robbing you of learning how to use code to solve problems.

Ah I see - so your issue is with the proliferation of tiny libraries associated with NPM?

That's not inherently an issue with Javascript. I agree that solving every issue with a library is bad in the same way that solving every issue by copy-pasting from stack overflow is bad, but it's not inherent to the language. I primarily work in Javascript these days and I've never actually seen a project that relies on an excess of micro-libraries. A good teacher will teach students to understand programming logic, not to lean on excessive crutches.

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