My first language was Basic (in 1982).
The second was assembly.
I've gotten by in my career (to put it mildly).
What "top tier" undergraduate program is graduating students that can't lay out data structures in memory, don't know types, and so on?
The second was assembly.
I've gotten by in my career (to put it mildly).
What "top tier" undergraduate program is graduating students that can't lay out data structures in memory, don't know types, and so on?
Those schools actually DO try to teach students about these concepts. How do I know? I personally have spoken to the deans of CS departments. Now imagine these same students, who no longer even hear of concepts such as garbage collection, pointers, etc. because it just works in their chosen language.
I believe the era of a single language for your career is long gone. Most people in their 20s and even 30s today will go through at least 4-5 different languages throughout their career.
Personally, I learned and enjoyed C++ 15 years ago but I do not find it practical for anything I do today. However, the same "impractical" knowledge allows me to get familiarized with a new language in a few weeks and start producing working software.
I don't quite care what language students learn as long as the concepts are understood. However, if the language they first start with hides most of these fundamental concepts, they no longer have any incentive to even learn how anything works.
This is not terribly different than what I suggest. I'm saying in the modern world, Python fills the role of Basic and C fills the role of assembly.
The abstract idea is:
First Language: Clean and simple, to introduce the very idea of coding algorithms for a computer.
Step two: Low-level language requiring a lot of attention to detail. Should be useful for exploring low-level details about computer architecture as well as writing real programs.
Notably: Java doesn't fit very well into either category. There's a lot of overhead for pure beginners, and too many layers between the programmer and the hardware