How to choose a teaching language

I think JAVA is a great way to get started. It lacks freedom and it covers a range of OOP concepts you’ll need familiarity with through its lack of freedom. It’s also a language you can actually use to get a job.

The job bit will vary from region to region, but in Europe, almost everything runs on either JAVA or C#, and I do mean almost everything. If I go to a job database the two top languages are JAVA and C# and the third, php, is around a 1/5 of either of those.

For computer science anyway. If you’re into IOT, Engineering, datascience or robotics you’ll do python or C.

Back to JAVA. It’s lack of freedom is a great teacher. You’ll learn what return types are in your first function along with access modifiers and it really only goes on from there.

I think python is a great language, but I think it’s much harder to teach programming with because it’s so forgiving and free.

I mean, freedom and joy of use could probably be really great motivators, but most CS teachers aren’t exactly great at that part of teaching, at least not the ones I had, and unless you’re really good at teaching freedom and easy of use both become risky.

Or maybe I’m just old and grumpy.