Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mettamage | Hacker News Reader

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I'd say for learning programming (the basics: variables, functions, if-statements and loops) JavaScript is better.

Why?

1. You can visualize your code easier..

2. You do get to be introduced to types, but don't have to worry too much about them (I got really upset when I learned that in Java you could only make arrays of one type as I didn't see the point, now I do, then I didn't).

3. Error handling is easier.

4. No memory management is not something you want to deal with as a beginner (as someone who starts learning programming, memory management is nonsense, later on it's a a necessity for performance).

5. A nicer debugging experience with Chrome dev tools.

So yea, for learning programming JS > C or C++ for that matter.

Disclaimer: my first programming language was Java. In light of that, I'd rather choose for C (that hello world example tripped me up for 8 weeks! After 8 weeks, I still didn't know what command-line arguments were as they taught us to use Eclispe... sigh).

Though, for learning how to hack: <3 C, <3 assemby, <3 opcodes. For learning how to hack, I love C. They made everything easy, there are leaks everywhere! I wonder how that will go about a 100 years from now when things are presumably a lot more tight and secure. Entry level hacking seems to become rarer everyday (aka a simple stack smash and voila! You're in!), so I wonder what difficult antics you'd need to do in a 100 years from now. But for now, we still have C.

Disclaimer: I really enjoyed C when learning how to hack, I might sound sarcastic, I'm not.

1. it's extremely hard for beginners to visualize the event loop and how it orders function execution and scope

2. really only primitives, not useful

3. it's not. again the event loop makes try/catch useless, there are too many different ways to handle errors for each situation.

4. and 5. ok, but you can have that, or better, with other languages.

Oh boy, I'm arguing over the Internet. Sorry for that. You do bring good points and I agree upfront that they are indeed JS features that either suck or are not very pedagogical.

1. You don't need to learn about the event loop straight away (or asynchronous programming) by the time you get to that concept, you might as well go to another language that's easier for that. But I do concede that once you get to async programming: JS is not the best language to learn from.

With that said for people who got past the basics, here's an intuitive video about the event loop [1] (note: if you're past the basics, don't watch it while you're still doing the basics xD).

2. Basic objects are easily learnable with JS since you can type them in a literal sense, whereas otherwise you need to instantiate it with a constructor (e.g. Java) or you don't really learn about objects (e.g. C, though I've heared that it does have objects right? Despite it being an obscure feature, anyways, I'm not sure if you should be happy to learn about objects, learning about dictionaries or hashing is cool though). More importantly, when you start out learning programming, primitives + some HTML + simple objects are all you need to know.

3. Yes, try/catch is useless. I wouldn't call that basic though, but I'm already noticing we're differing on definitions (note: my definition was relatively clear, variables, if-statements, for loops and functions). And in coding bootcamps, the concept came long after I taught the basics of programming (e.g. it came in week 5 because of NodeJS). I remember Python being better for this.

Errors in try/catch are as infuriating as segfaults or other memory leaks / coredump issues, they simply seem to happen in C a lot more when you're just starting out with programming (sorry if I mangle terms, C has been a while for me, and I like C, just not as a starter language, just as I used to like Charizard but not as a starter pokémon :D). Later on, it's a different story and I have suffered enough pain from it.

Note: I'm not saying JS is the best language to learn from in the world. I think Python is better suited for that, or in some cases Scratch, or in other cases C# + Unity3D.

I'm simply saying it's better than C (in terms of learning programming basics).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aGhZQkoFbQ

First, I didn't make it clear that I'm not advocating for introducing types to beginners. I advocate against JavaScript in particular for beginners.

Re: 1, yoy absolutely have to introduce it as soon as you move beyond the most trivial synyax example. Nodejs, browser, whatever you do, the most trivial thing that actually runs somewhere _will_ have callbacks that are run in the event loop queue. Not run in line-order, which is what beginners learn first. Now you have to go down a rabbit whole about the event loop, what and how and when fns gets put on the queue etc etc. Not ideal IMO since it's pretty specific to JS.

2. I buy that it's better than nasty Java, but any weakly typed language applies.

So yea, Python is probably the best in terms of easiness and less paradigm-specific cruft.

I personally found JS much easier and accessible than Python, but YMMV.

I tried a number of different languages when I first started seriously pursuing a job in dev - C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, and eventually I settled on JS. JS let me quickly get something working while being able to understand what was going on. The other platforms had various barriers that made it difficult to focus on what I wanted to do because I had to know a ton of other things first, or to accept not knowing how something functioned (especially true with Rails).

The only real gotcha I really had struggled with in my first year as a professional dev was reference variables, but that is a gotcha you could run into in most standard languages and not unique to JavaScript.

Elm, the language of the article, does not have refs :)

Also in the only study really done about programming language types, the initial overhead of learning types is is outweighed by the value types bring almost as soon as you start.

I wasn't clear, sorry. It makes sense to introduce types later.

I was questioning picking JS as teaching language, instead of e.g. Python.

Is it just me or is teaching Python way more popular than it should be? Just because a lot of us learned on BASIC dialect, doesn't mean imperative programming 'makes sense' for teaching. Related to the article, Elm seems a fit language for on-boarding new programmers given it's training-wheels type system, friendly error messages, and it's target is visual where newcomers can see the output of what their building. If not, the LISP family has pretty good story here too for simplicity; it's no wonder Scheme & Racket are also popular languages to begin with.

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