Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Ugh...I saw the title and had positive expectations because usually, it seems, letters to high school teachers are positive, as in: "My teenage child was depressed but your class made her love school again, etc. etc."

A couple of takeaways:

1. The fact that the OP's daughter signed up for programming class because she wanted to impress her parent is truly a parenting win. Not just for programming, but anything, at that age.

2. I consider myself pretty open minded about gender diversity...but as I was reading the OP's post, I completely assumed it was written by a programmer-father, until I got to the part where the OP describes being harassed. Still, the mental stereotype was so strong that when writing this comment, I kept having to not refer to the OP as the father of the daughter. The trolling that the OP describes is troubling. But it's easy to be angry at the trolling, and raise awareness about it. Unfortunately, I think women in tech still have the much more difficult task of fighting pervasive, subconscious stereotyping and assumptions in the industry.

edit: 3. The OP treats the use of Visual Basic as an ancillary problem...and it is, compared to what her daughter had to put up. But yeah, VB, seriously? I respect people who do VB -- and do it well, because they have to maintain legacy software at a big company...but if you're a programming teacher, you should have a passion to make your subject as relevant to your students and their contemporary lives when possible...nevermind that using VB, in this day and age, has some considerable barriers to just "dive into" compared to, say, Javascript. It'd be like a physics teacher who didn't make a single reference to CERN, Elon Musk, or physics as it applies to modern athletic competitions.

Javascript has HUGE barriers compared to Visual Basic. Picture who you're teaching. These aren't generally kids who know anything about programming. They're kids who have never seen anything even similar to programming before. In fact, the vast majority of them probably don't even want to be there.

So you teach Visual Basic, because it has less "gotchas" than Javascript, it reads more like english, it has less intimidating symbols, it can be made to be strongly typed so that they'll receive feedback at compile time, it comes with a powerful WYSIWYG tool built into the IDE, and it has a vast, VAST suit of powerful first and third party libraries that can make the kids feel like they're performing magic.

Visual Basic gets shit on a lot by people, and perhaps justifiably in the business world - but in the teaching world (especially when you're teaching people who are ignorant of and generally apathetic to the subject matter), there are few languages that compare to it favorably.

With regards to your third point:

Is there a modern (or better suited for introductory courses) language that has the kind of curriculums built around it that VB and Java do?

Codecademy and the like are awesome for independent learning and exploration, but it doesn't work for classroom instruction. There don't seem to be many curriculums designed around modern, web-focused languages like Ruby or Javascript that your average teacher can use for high school CS classes.

I think JavaScript fits the bill.

I never took programming in high school, so maybe I'm setting my sights low...but even with a well developed curriculum, it's hard to imagine that the class gets very far.

Whereas with JavaScript, they can literally start executing code as soon as they open their browsers. I think that makes up, at least a little, of the time lost in not having as mature of a curriculum.

But I think the big win with JS is opportunity. Whatever crappy program they might come up with, they can immediately show it to their classmates and also to any friends or family with a simple link...it's not quite as easy to distribute a VB or other compiled executable. This kind of sharing makes programming...I would think...much more dynamic and lively.

And in addition to that, they get some web development experience...which is handy now and likely to be useful in 5 years. Whereas with VB, and most other programming languages...it's possible to learn them without gaining any hands-on experience with the Web.

I'd tend to agree with you. But the problem of teaching it still remains. While it'd be great for dedicated teachers at each school to create a flexible, Javascript-based curriculum built around online courses and projects, I think the reality is that very few would have the time, energy, or motivation to do so. So far as I know, there don't exist very many Javascript textbooks aimed at the high school, middle school, and (hopefully) elementary school levels. Without that kind of traditional material, it's difficult for even passionate teachers to get classes approved by administrators.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6358970 for my previous comment about why I chose VB (I'm a teacher and was a developer)

The questions/problems that the exam board sets (considering the number of hours the students get to solve them in) are really suited to VB, or another Visual based language. What I'm trying to say is that the language chosen also has to fit the requirements of the exam board, as the students, school and myself are all judged by our results (GCSE grade etc).

Edited: changed wording for clarity

My 2004 CS class was Visual Basic. The instructor didn't know anything, but its hard to hold that against a guy making ~$40k/yr at midcareer. Instead of a competent teacher, we had textbooks that we were expected to work through one chapter at a time. I suspect the OP's daughter was brought in for a similar type of education, and the textbooks just haven't been updated since the early 2000s. That's really the only logical explanation for teaching a class in VB in 2013.

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