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Comment by scootklein | Hacker News Reader

couldn't agree more. i started with java in high school and was too caught up in "public static void main" to realize that it was up to me to define methods that made sense and that things generally ran top to bottom. switching to php for a while made everything "click" before heading back to java

getting rid of CS terms and data types allows you to learn how to think in program flow and "what am i actually doing here". failing to capture the attention in this first step is lethal to most people that otherwise would be good at programming if they hadn't run quickly at their first try

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That's precisely why I think Java is a horrible language to start people out in.

Well, not language. Library. It's abstracted to the extreme, and confusing as heck to anyone just starting to learn how to think about how to program.

Start people out in something simple. Ruby can teach bad habits, so don't tell them about monkey patching, but it's so simple it's a great way to hook people, and has simple console / file IO that'll let newbies actually do something with their skills, instead of being glad their project doesn't overflow its array bounds or get stuck in hideous C input handling deathtraps (which flags do you have to reset in the input stream if they start inputting Japanese? I forget...)

Best of all, despite being OO, you don't need a class to start doing things. Something Java gets wrong for beginners.

  #!/usr/bin/env ruby
  puts "hello world"

Classes can wait, they're a whole can of worms that should come after people learn to think clearly enough for a computer to understand them.

If you're burnt out on using Java for introductory courses, consider using Groovy. (http://groovy.codehaus.org/). It takes a lot of the pain and boilerplate code out of java, making it easier for students to focus on what they're actually doing and not writing "public static void main String args" all of the time.

Similar to your example, this is a valid groovy program:

println "Hello!"

But, unlike Python or Ruby, you're still in the Java world so migrating back to to pure Java is a lot easier. Though, the shrieks of pain you'll endure when you explain why they now have to write constructors or getters and setters might hurt. :-)

Have seen it, but never used it. It looks decently active on the forums, despite the home page showing an award from 2007 (and looking older than that)... how's the community / code health? On something like a .NET-to-Ruby/Python scale? I'll keep it in mind for any future Java necessities.

I agree with your comments to some degree. My first programming course was in Java. I definitely did get a bit confused in the whole "public static void main" but at the same time, when I moved to python, it was trivial to learn, and I felt like I had picked up some important concepts along the way. You can get lost in the whole architecture thing, but it can help you understand design abstractions as well.

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