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Comment by Gunax | Hacker News Reader

I am assuming these are not new programmers though.

When I learned Java as a first language, I remember being very confused by those words. They did not make sense to me for months.

To a noob, it's a meaningless incantation that needs to be inserted for each project.

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> They did not make sense to me for months.

I have been on the same path.

> When I learned Java as a first language

You have my sympathies

As do all students at my university where Java is not only the first language, but also used for Data structures and Algorithms, practical semester projects, etc. Many of these people finish their degrees without knowing languages other than Java and maybe Python and C/C++ exist.

I don't think it's a bad beginner language at all. It's low level enough to learn about the inner workings in a structured way, but it's high level enough to not run into segmentation errors all the time. In some courses they wrote Java bytecode as a substitute for an assembly language, which seems completely sensible to me since it'll be more broadly applicable than a specific ISA.

Setting up the tooling was a pain though. I did the JavaFX parts of the exam without ever having used it because I (with the help of multiple Linux nerds!) couldn't get it to run on Arch.

When was it? JavaFX is not completely painless, but chances are you only need a single package available by default on most distros, if anything nowadays.

(Some distros may even package a JDK with bundled javafx).

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