[technion]

This relates heavily to the "what language should be taught in schools" argument. I usually answer "Java". And it's not even that I particularly like Java, it's just that the discussion often neglects that the course involved is all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on. It's nonsense to shoehorn this into many other languages.

[ken]

But why is the course “all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on”? It sounds like a Java class before the language is even chosen. No wonder the best choice ends up being Java.

When I took CS in school, these were not the central themes. On the last day of class the teacher showed us a short program in this funky new language called “Java” and we all had a good laugh at how it tried to make everything about objects, even where it made no sense.

Even if you’re only trying to teach object-oriented programming, I can think of better languages.

[dagw]

I think it really depends on if you're teaching CS or programming. If I was designing a CS curriculum I would almost certainly start with something like Haskell, Lisp or Scheme. If I was designing a programming curriculum I would almost certainly start with Java, C# or Python.

At the end of the day your average programming job at your average company is “all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on”, and if you want to prepare students for that, you should probably focus on that.

[wegs]

Dijkstra once said: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

I find much the same to often be true for many Java programmers. Programmers who start out with a course all about classes, getters and setters, inheritance and so on often end up with their minds wedged such that they never learn to program properly.

Java has one way to do everything. That's reasonable if you're running a large IT department and want programmers to be interchangeable between projects. That's a horrible way to have people understand the richness of computation.

You want new students to learn at least two ways to do abstraction and to structure code, and ideally, to learn many. Then, if they do Java for a random bank or something, they'll see where Java is on the spectrum. If you start with Java, you end with a closed mind.

[geofft]

Dijkstra was empirically wrong about that (generations of perfectly good programmers were taught BASIC first in schools) and about most of the other witty and self-congratulatory quotes in that collection: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD04xx/EW... Perhaps the most amusingly wrong one is the claim of FORTRAN, which sits at the core of the scientific Python stack, as "hopelessly inadequate for whatever computer application you have in mind today [i.e., 1975]: it is now too clumsy, too risky, and too expensive to use."

Dijkstra was good at many things, but there's no need for an argument from authority when we have actual data and not just opinions made to sound stronger because they are phrased more aggressively.

[wegs]

I agree that he was wrong about that :)

Or to put things more accurately, he exaggerated for humor. It's a communications style. He was wrong if you read it too literally.

If you read him less literally, the basic point he was making was right.

If you start out in a language like BASIC, plenty of programmers never make it to the other side. And it applies much more to Java than to BASIC. With BASIC, everyone who goes into programming will move on at some point (there aren't BASIC jobs out there), and they'll be forced to learn something different. With Java, plenty of people learn it, work whole careers, and never know any better. That doesn't just prevent them from coding in Ruby on Rails or whatever else -- it makes them worse Java programmers too. They understand WHAT, but they don't understand WHY. They can't reason about things like abstraction from first principles.

You want to start out with a broad view of computation. From there, you then want to narrow. Java is okay for a junior-level course on OOP, but it's really, really lousy for a first exposure to programming, or a freshman course.

(I started out in BASIC too).