Hacker News Reader

Comment by patrickg | Hacker News Reader

Teaching programming to my 8 year old is a burden, because everything is in English. Teaching two things at a time is more difficult than it has to be.

View on HN

A lot of the best programmers I know are foreigners, and they learned English and their respective programming languages side by side. It is a lot more useful to know English to search and ask for programming help in, than to seek help from natives of your language whose skill set may be very minimal and may not be of any use, or worse, they may suggest poor programming practice.

You did read that I was talking about an 8 year old kid who is learning the words "clothes" and "red" in school? Still a few years to go to ask for and look for programming help in English.

A lot of programmers I know start young, maybe not that young though, my apologies. I know people who started at age 12 or so. I started looking at programming maybe at 11 years of age or 10, I didn't get anything till years later, it takes time and practice.

Kids learn languages a lot better when they have a use case, so I'd argue that teaching them english at the same time as teaching them programming, is actually beneficial.

And let's face it, the vocabulary of programming languages is tiny.

While I agree to the use case / tiny arguments, it doesn't seem to work in practice. I am now using Scratch (https://scratch.mit.edu/) to teach programming. Much better.

Scratch has the advantage of making the limitations of the computer tangible. The block nature will show you what can be done and what can't. For example, newbies in procedural languages often try things like

if(something){loop = while} else {loop=if} loop{print("hi")}

and it's not immediately obvious why that isn't valid in text, while in scratch it is.

I don't think its the language though that makes things easier.

> if(something){loop = while} else {loop=if} loop{print("hi")}

The only reason that wouldn't work is bad language design. In e.g. Smalltalk or TCL it's fine.

Thats not relevant to the point. And even smalltalk wouldn't allow this, without reflection, since method handles aren't really first class objects.

It is exactly the point: the problem is real, but you don't have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Instead you can use a simple, homoiconic, but still very "real" programming language for teaching.

> homoiconic

I don't think it means what you think it means.

It's not strictly what I mean, but in practice there's a close correlation; homoiconic languages naturally lend themselves to metaprogramming and so it's more normal to implement e.g. control flow as ordinary functions in the language (where they might be dedicated syntax in other languages). But yes, I really mean a low-syntax language, and they're not all homoiconic.

This feels like a case of, if we all got hit on the heads with baseball bats every week, people will start to extoll the benefits of getting hit on the head with baseball bats. It builds character! And it's not that painful!

Really?

I just memorized things. And they'll learn a little bit of English

They don't need to know what 'if' means, they just need to learn "you use if to do this"

(Now, to be fair the docs were in my native language, that helped a lot)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com