Hacker News Reader

Comment by enum | Hacker News Reader

The abstract asks:

> Why do we not have a programming language that is designed for education and in widespread use across the world

It is important for a teacher to immediately demonstrate subject-matter mastery. If a student asks a question that goes beyond the planned lesson, you need to have an answer. You can't say, "I don't know how to do that." That would make you look incompetent.

When you're teaching programming, it is easiest to do this with a programming language that you know well and use everyday. That language is unlikely be a language designed explicitly for education.

View on HN

I was a TA and instructor for several programming classes, usually in Java, with which I was moderately experienced but not an expert.

My students would frequently ask how to accomplish something, how syntax or keywords worked on q deeper level, whether there was a stl class for a purpose, or what caused an error, etc, that I didn't know about already. I didn't hide my ignorance even a little bit, but Idid help them find an answer. In lecture settings, if it wasn't too much of a digression, I'd demonstrate finding the answer. In one on one help, or one on group help, I'd lead them through finding the answer themselves. My students had a lot of respect for me as an authority on the language and still listened to my advice and came to me with questions frequently.

This is kinda important across all fields, but especially in programming, you don't need to know the right answer by rote so much as you need to be able to seek and identify the right answer with some independence using existing resources.

Absolutely. Demonstrating how to Google (and now, how to ChatGPT) is important. The pervasiveness of Java makes it relatively easy to do.

> If a student asks a question that goes beyond the planned lesson, you need to have an answer. You can't say, "I don't know how to do that." That would make you look incompetent.

Huh? It's perfectly normal for the curiosity of students to surpass the subject matter expertise of the teacher. Why do you believe that makes the teacher incompetent?

As my great teacher, Nikos Tzanakis, used to say: nobody is infallible. The only infallible people are secondary education teachers!

Huh? I teach a first year programming course. I often reply to questions with "let's see if the compiler lets us do that" or "let's quickly search how to do that".

We do this in our regular job. It makes sense to me to demonstrate this process to students.

None of us knows everything there is to know about a language and its libraries. Heck, I'm part of the language development team of a language and I have to look things up about it.

This is true, as long as you consider immediately knowing to Google it and competently doing so a valid answer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com