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Comment by kaba0 | Hacker News Reader

I am sure I’m absolutely nowhere near your knowledge and expertise, but please bear with me sharing my opinion :)

I think Java fits better as an introductory language — it is similarly popular as JS and python, and while I’m sure static typing can be picked up easily, I think fighting the compiler for a likely-correct program in the end is a better alternative than understanding why the program failed with this given input and not with another — so my not-backed-up-by-teaching opinion is that dynamic languages are not necessarily a great fit. It also features the basic OOP concepts, and modern java can showcase plenty of FP ones as well.

On the other hand, going lower level is similarly detrimental, I’ve taken a class where C was used, and that way you get cryptic runtime errors as well, while memory management is not that hard to pick up later on.

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Intro classes don’t need to overburden the student. The biggest hurdle for students is thinking like a computer. You start introducing all these extra things to just get going and it becomes even more difficult.

Explaining to students what public static void main means is pretty annoying and seeing cryptic syntax littered everywhere does not help students when they’re first learning.

Dynamic languages make much more sense to beginners because the idea of what a variable represents is more abstract to them than tangible to you. To them, they don’t see the value of types because they’re not going to be building large programs where that is going to matter. They know what their functions return and take in, because they probably only have one or two. Performance and compiling is also not as much of a concern, etc...

I agree with you on the overburden part, but not on the dynamic lang part. My very minimal experience is that the hardest thing to get right as a beginner (or even as an experienced developer) is to be able to follow the flow of your code (Maybe introductory courses should employ the debugger?), and the exact state it has at a given point, eg. at an exception. Restricting the valid states imo helps understanding. As well as not having to debug at all at first, but the compiler notifying what is wrong immediately.

I think that you're right in that it's hard to compose all those parts of your program together without accidentally mistaking a `Query` for a `string`, or god knows what. I'm helping a friend learn web development, and most of the issues they get stuck for long time at are solved by making sure that functions you are calling are returning what you think they are.

On the other hand, I feel that most of the lessons I've learnt that have really stuck are the ones where I first do a thing wrong, and then find how to do it right. In a similar fashion, letting the student create a steaming pile of ... and then giving them a solution to their troubles in a later course feels like a good idea.

I personally have come a full circle: starting with things like Pascal and C++, then going to C# and finding type inference interesting, then getting a HUGE boost to my knowledge and skills when I found Python and JS. A few years later, my personal preference is having static type checking, and Typescript does that pretty well, in my opinion. However, every time I remember how much I managed to learn and understand about programming when I switched to Python, I think that if I had to teach someone, I'd pick something expressive, intuitive and who cares about types when you really want to maximize exposure.

> Explaining to students what public static void main means is pretty annoying and seeing cryptic syntax littered everywhere does not help students when they’re first learning.

C# has solved that with "top level statements" [1]. If Java added that then problem solved, right? It's a simple addition.

[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/whats-new/csh...

C# would be a better choice. In addition to top-level statements, the standard API seems much less "dogmatically" OOP. Reading a file is just one static method away. Unfortunately, it's still not possible to have top-level functions, right?

But C# on the other hand is a very very complex language, with almost double the keywords compared to Java.

Yes, but I think the learning curve matters more, especially for students who are going to be mostly writing code, not reading existing projects.

> I think fighting the compiler for a likely-correct program in the end is a better alternative than understanding why the program failed with this given input and not with another

In my experience (having TAed a CS1 course) I think it is better for introductory students to be able to figure out what they are doing wrong, rather than having a compiler point it out to them.

In the first class, we want to focus on computational thinking and being able to then express their ideas into programs. So we intentionally use very little of the language (JS in my case), because the language is not the point of the course.

OOP and all these models of abstraction and code organisation come later, once they have a good grasp of the fundamentals.

This particular course I taught is only taken by CS freshmen, so that other commenter's remark (that we should teach a popular language) doesn't apply here.

> I think it is better for introductory students to be able to figure out what they are doing wrong, rather than having a compiler point it out to them.

That’s implying they will find it out, instead of having a finished project that can randomly crash with a slightly different input.

Also, the compiler is basically just a shorter eval loop.

But I agree with you that OOP should only come later (though using objects is inevitable in most languages)

I think wrapping all your code in OOP boilerplate is probably too much for an intro course. One of the nice things about Python is that hello world is `print("Hello world")`. No `public static void main(String[] args)`, no nothing. And then on top of that, you can add your functions and classes and whatnot, but it's easier to wrap your head around a zero-fluff entry point.

print "Hello world" - python 2 was/is even nicer in that regard.

> I think Java fits better as an introductory language

Oh no, for a beginner just setting up the environment is a huge hurdle. Sun's Java downloads page is utterly confusing, and the IDEs are monstrous and complex too. Past that, they have to learn about the JVM and compiling to JARs before they can even run their first program. Leave all that housekeeping to us seasoned, soul-crushed developers ;)

If we're starting to teach compiled, boilerplate-ridden laguages to beginners, why not jump straight to C++ or Rust?

Sun’s download page?? Also, vim is more than enough for beginners and there is hardly anything hard in javac Main.java && java Main. With a modern JDK java Main.java will compile and run it in one go even. Jars are absolutely not required.

Oracle! I guess I showed my age, and that the last time I developed on Java I had to use Eclipse and I still have PTSD from it.

Having gone the other way (starting with JS and moving into languages like Objective C), I actually disagree. Having a solid foundation in software writing helped me when I started to learn about the somewhat obtuse abstract concepts that tend to be coupled with learning strict typing.

Then, when learning Flow and Typescript, where I'm expected to have a meta understanding of typing itself, I was ready to go.

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