There are some computer science programs which use C++ as the language for the introductory courses and I feel great pity for those students what a horrible way to be introduced to programming
@wallhackio our class did this and even at the time i felt like they should have just done C instead
@wallhackio it’s wild to go through a basic computer science class and still not be able to read a single file of C code because they never REALLY taught you how malloc() and friends worked
@Lady strange to use C++ then.
Also I am curious what language would you use to teach new programmers basic software concepts
@wallhackio i think basic software concepts should be taught in C, because there is no more basic software concept than “produce readable, maintainable code and do not shoot yourself in the foot”, and C is the easiest language in which to discern whether a student has learned these lessons
for anything more advanced than that, idk, probably Swift
@wallhackio (actually i think there’s an argument to teach basic programming concepts in POSIX sh instead, and would also consider this acceptable, but this is a more radical take)
@Lady @wallhackio POSIX shell sounds like it would be hard to teach because of all the nasty corners in it but this is otherwise a good take
@aescling @wallhackio name a nasty corner in POSIX shell
@aescling @wallhackio i’m not sure teaching “computers have to tokenize your code before they can read it” is a bad thing necessarily
@Lady @aescling @wallhackio i do think that shell commands spending so much of their time as strings before the computer does anything is bizarre and sets up weird expectations if you try to then go to another language
like i can't think of how exactly to phrase this but the old rm -rf $STEAM_DIR/* bug that just wipes your drive when $STEAM_DIR is empty, is like. i can think of ways that a similar kind of bug could come up in other languages but that feels like the result of a sharp corner to me
@monorail @aescling @wallhackio i don't see footguns like this as a bad thing in a teaching language tho, where you are having a professor review every line you write. in fact, having an expert review every line you write is probably one of the easier ways to learn shell
is shell knowledge transferrable to other languages? i agree that the answer there is mostly no, but i think it’s an open question whether the goal of an introductory programming course is to teach transferable programming skills, or just to teach the social aspect of thinking about and writing programs.
@Lady @aescling @wallhackio imo whether you're trying to teach transferrable skills or teach how to think about and write programs, "especially weird language-specific behaviour" hurts both cases. regardless of the goal, you still have to spend some time teaching "this is how it works here in particular" when "here in particular" isn't really the point
and every language has some weird language-specific behaviour but ideally you want to minimize that
though sometimes practicality has to come before ideals here ofc
@monorail @aescling @wallhackio this is definitely showing the areas where i spend my time but to me, i write a lot of HTML and XML and Makefile and parsers for various other formats. and like, HTML parsing is a mess. Makefile parsing is full of weird quirks. XML is better than the other two but still nontrivial in a lot of ways. and obviously all of these are very different. but i think the general lesson is “computers have a certain methodology for processing what you write, and you have to understand that methodology in order to communicate meaningfully with them”.
i think with a lot of programming languages, people never learn this lesson. 99% of javascript programmers have no idea how the computer processes a javascript program, because they learn a few rules of thumb on how to write it, and assume that if they follow those rules, the computer can read it the same as a human can.
with shell, this is not the case. you absolutely have to learn the lesson that computers do not know how to read, at least not the way humans approach reading. and yes, the particularities of that are very specific. but i think learning how to learn the very specific particularities of a language and apply them consistently is the lesson here, and a good thing to teach. and shell scripts are a simple enough language that the entire format could conceivably be taught in the context of a single course.
