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Comment by xtrumanx | Hacker News Reader

I believe the biggest problem with introductory programming courses is that students are taught two things at once; programming logic and syntax.

To a newbie, rules like ending statements in a semi-colon, wrapping strings in quotes and remembering the casing of a function name can be difficult. Ask them to produce a program with branching and looping with proper syntax and things get needlessly difficult.

I tried teaching a programming class with pseudo code and I found the class seem easier for most than those that had to learn the same material in an actual programming language.

If you could relieve the burden of syntax initially, that's great. But they'll have to learn to carry that burden eventually like the rest of us if they ever want to produce anything of value.

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Yeah, i recall poking at basic back in the day and getting that every puzzling "syntax error" back.

Also, there is a mass of bugs out there that come from someone misplacing or forgetting a " or similar.

One thing that is likely needed though is some way to rapidly insert blocks via keyboard, as right now most of these interfaces are overly mouse driven when you want to modify a bunch of blocks quickly.

When I tutored/taught I always found that logic was the root cause of a student's struggle. If you can't understand the logic, there's absolutely no way to understand implementation.

The most unusual situation I've seen when teaching (shit-tier university) was that some students couldn't look at a single ASM instruction and understand what it's doing after being explained the syntax:

   ADD R1, R2, R3 ; R2 + R3 --> Store sum in R1

It's almost like some students aren't even ready to learn...o_O

I tend to agree with this. Whenever I'm tutoring and students are having trouble with some piece of syntax, that's almost always the most trivial problem.

I've often encountered students who think they need help with syntax, but in actuality have no understanding of how they're going to actually solve the problem. Conversely, I've never encountered a student who has a good idea of how to solve the problem but just has a syntax error.

This whole "syntax errors cause problems in teaching" thing is something students shouldn't be told. Both because it's pretty untrue on balance, and also because it allows them to blame "syntax" when they write down some copy pasta nonsense and it doesn't work due to compiler errors (completely glossing over the fact that even if there were no compilation errors, the code would still be absurd nonsense.)

With syntac out of the way, they could experiment and iterate with the logic to learn faster. Imagine of legos melted every time you put two together in a way that didn't math the model you were building, and you had to go out and buy a new set.

I don't know about you, but my source code doesn't delete itself every time I have a compile error.

As ever, Haskell leads the way: https://twitter.com/bos31337/status/116372971509121025

Perhaps someone can recall the study, but this has been studied and documented.

From a small sample, a significant percentage of students, simply could not fill in the correct values for a short sequence of C-style assignments.

Ability to model a set of sequenced imperative statements is clearly a skill that not all may have.

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