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Comment by songzme | Hacker News Reader

Our decision behind JavaScript:

We want our students to understand technology at a conceptual level first, end to end:

1. Client side - Mobile, web, terminal 2. Server side - Database interactions, system design and optimization 3. Batch - ML models and scripting

AFAIK, JavaScript is the only language that is able to cover everything end to end (front end to backend to scripting to even ML) so I'm able to come up with appropriate exercises for each of the moving parts.

Afterwards, they should pickup domain specific language that optimizes for each task.

I think it may be too overwhelming for students to learn different languages and learn the high level concepts at the same time.

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"I think it may be too overwhelming for students to learn different languages and learn the high level concepts at the same time."

That would take literally years.

I'm currently teaching a friend of mine "Computer Science" (he means programming primarily, but a bit of theory). He showed me his spreadsheet where he laid out his grand plan for the summer, in which he plans on basically covering the whole of CLRS in a week.

I explain things and help him write better code when he sends me stuff he's written but it's difficult to best explain that I've spent years getting to the point where I can write good, efficient, code - let alone starting almost genuinely from scratch ("What's a terminal"), and with an all too common disease that I'm going to call "Let you google that for me"

There's probably a joke in that he goes to Harvard and I go to a university you've probably never heard of but hey ho

The (old, old) joke is...

"You can always tell a Harvard man, but you can't tell him much."

Are there times when you think TypeScript could make some of the advanced projects less frustrating for the students?

Yeah after the curriculum, the students transition to using typescript. It is a natural progression towards wanting to type your function arguments and return values for clarity and consistency.

If you are targeting people learning programming, it really does not matter. TypeScript really makes sense to those who were already comfortable with a strongly typed language (eg Java, C#) before learning JS.

as they learn, I want them to build reliable open source products that will be useful and maintainable after they find jobs and leave. Since less experienced engineers are prone to making mistakes, TypeScript have been really helpful in maintaining code quality. I think its a win win for their growth and for code quality.

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