Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by ksml 1703 days ago
That sounds like a pedagogy problem, not a language problem. From my experience [1], students learn JS just fine as a first language, as long as the learning process is structured well. Every practical language has its quirks, and no one learns a programming language by learning all the quirks at one time. You can be productive in JS without understanding all of the quirks, and then build up to that later.

When you're teaching, you should be enabling the student to do one more thing that they couldn't do before. If you're spending 30+ minutes trying to explain what an object is, you're trying to do way too much. You don't need to have a 100% complete and correct understanding of Javascript's object model to use objects.

> Contrast that with something like Java or even Rust where, despite the other complexities, it's pretty clear what the data is and how it is stored.

That's nonsense. Particularly with Rust, now you're deep in the weeds of pointers, stack vs heap vs other segments, and borrow checking rules.

[1] helped design a JS class at Stanford for first-time programmers. Also designed an intro Rust class.

1 comments

Right but this is my point. The bootcamp does a terrible job explaining this stuff, so I have to re-teach it in my mentoring sessions.