Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

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This has always been my problem with websites like codeacademy, and I started my entire career by learning through that website.

Take the Javascript course - a fantastic way to get introduced to the syntax of the language, and I highly recommend it for total noobies. But then you come out of it with no understanding whatsoever about what javascript is. If I asked someone who just finished the course to make an "app" that console.log'd to the console, they wouldn't understand where to start. They wouldn't know that JS is a language run in the browser, that they need an HTML file with a script tag or a node file that they can run in the terminal. They wouldn't know about DOM manipulation, etc.

This reminds me of the Java class I took in highschool - the teacher was going on about ints and floats and loops, and the only questioned I wanted answered, and never got an answer for, was "what does `public static void main` mean?" I think the fact that I never got an answer to questions like that are why it took me nearly 3 years into my career to figure out I should be a developer.

> "what does `public static void main` mean?"

The problem with this question is that there is a ton of stuff you need to understand before you can really answer that question fully. To know what public means, you need to understand classes, and visibility rules for classes. To understand static fully, you kind of need to know how c++ works, since it's equivalent to a bare function in a namespace. Void is the type of the return, which means it doesn't have so that's pretty straight-forward. Main is the name of the function that gets run when you run the program, which kind of requires knowledge of program entry points (assembly) either that or the understanding of what a library is. The simplest thing you can say is that it's boilerplate to signify what function gets run when the program starts, but that doesn't really explain any of the pieces.

Then why start teaching programming with Java in the first place when understanding those concepts involves an at least mediocre understanding of object orientation?

There are many more languages that implement a "Hello, world!" with one line of code. If explaining "public static void main" is too hard, maybe one is using the wrong tool.

This is an idea that many people resist. I think they mistakenly believe that programming languages are genuinely difficult to learn, and students must start on one that is marketable.

It's hard to teach an introduction to programming without teaching a particular language. If you have to pick a particular language, it makes sense to choose something the student is likely to use in the future. This is not hard to understand.

I always assumed that's why Python was so popular in universities. It's OOP & it's low on syntax.

I don't really approve of this view. CS students are going to be programming in current-gen languages like Java, Python, C/C++ and JS in industry anyway (C is perhaps last-gen...). I think academia should lie a couple steps ahead and introduce students to stuff that will help them advance the industry. Next-gen and maybe experimental/academic languages and tools. Teaching students current industry languages/tools is good for the individual student but bad for the industry as a whole because it causes stagnation. Universities are big enough that they ought to be able to rise above this tragedy of the commons and do something for the greater good rather than think narrowly of the individual student.

That's silly. If you can reasonably claim to know how to program, the choice of language largely doesn't matter. Someone who knows how to program in [first language] should be able to pick up how to program in any language one is likely to encounter in an industry position.

So the first language should be one that gives the student a firm foundation from which one can become that competent.

I've personally seen excellent introductions to programming using C (CS50x), Python (Think Python, MIT 6.001), and Scheme (SICP).

That's a big part of many bootcamps' marketing model. Start in web dev, move on to other things.

My point is that you likely learned programming by learning the basics of file I/O in C or Python or something similar. You didn't sit down and learn all about automata theory etc. first. You need the context of what C.S. is used for before these things make sense to you, so you start by learning a bit of programming. Since you must be definition have A first language, why not pick one that is most likely to be used?

Because it's stuff the will teach eventually and don't want to force students to learn a different syntax a few weeks in. I'm not sure if students can handle the syntax switch or not though.

For me and probably many others having it go unexplained was like dangling carrot in front of me. I went home and read more about it.

Because, College Board.

I'm so glad I learned Lua before taking APCS, otherwise that class probably would have set me back 6 years.

Java is a terrible first language. Python is even worse. They both require a good understanding of a ton of different topics to understand them as anything but magic incantations.

"The problem with this question is that there is a ton of stuff you need to understand before you can really answer that question fully."

Which is why Java is a terrible language for an introductory programming class.

It was the first object-oriented language that I learned, and some of my classmates' first language. It wasn't too bad to be told "Just type it for now; we'll get into object orientation next week and explain it then." From my own experience, I don't think it's a big issue if it's introduced correctly.

I suspect you are far more willing to learn by rote than some other students.

For a particular kind of curious student, "just do it because you have to" is a very fast way to them checking out and doing nothing at all.

I held onto the promise of a forthcoming explanation (and read ahead in the book, anyhow). Honestly, someone who can't deal with a little ambiguity when starting out on a new technology isn't going to last long in the field anyhow, especially with the amount of self-learning that you end up doing.

Agreed, for a number of students the promise to explain it later will suffice. Others - when given magic boilerplate that does strange, intended things - will recognize it for the black magic it is and will want to wield it as well.

They will dissect, examine and research it on their own and their learning will be much deeper.

Well, that's me in a nutshell though. If I don't get the answers I need soon, I get frustrated and it becomes nearly impossible to stay focused or motivated. With web development, I was lucky in that I had teachers that were willing to humor my curiosity, and I could also hop on the internet and IRC channels.

Self learning is the opposite of the classroom issues I had. I can start a webpack tutorial, it'll mention Make, and I can click links and chase down information, and just keep my stupidly ADHD brain entertained with more and more new new new things. This is how I have to learn things, apparently.

That sounds more like a problem with incoming student's expectations than with the teaching method. Almost every interesting (i.e., sufficiently complex) subject isn't arranged in a pedagogical hierarchy. You can't explain history from the first day, because you'd have to explain where that knowledge came from. You can't explain math without pushing things for later because students are not prepared for generality on day 1. You can't explain human biology by describing various cells. Etc..

If a student is going to 'check out' because they didn't get a question answered, then they're probably just going to fail. See your teacher after class, ask a friend, look it up online... If are a 'curious student' doesn't see these very obvious methods of satisfying their curiosity, then they're probably not worth a teacher's efforts.

I've always thought Java was an awful introductory language. It's a decent teaching language but in order to actually understand what's going on and why, you need to already be familiar with huge swathes of modern computer science.

Python is even worse, because it's so high level and so much happens 'by magic'. Don't get me wrong, it's a great teaching language because it does cover so much ground, but it's terrible as a first introduction for a new programmer.

They need to start with something simple and fairly concrete. Maybe even start with a simulated 'toy' assembler (first semester CS101 = Zachtronics games?) then something like Pascal to teach the basics of control flow and sequential processing.

Once students understand primitive data types, control structures, functions, and compound user-defined data types, they're probably ready to learn some OO.

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