[jknoepfler]

Yeah, you want to start with basic imperative programming with as little cargo-cult nonsense in the way as possible.

Your csci 101 kids will not benefit from unpacking what it means to compile an object-oriented language down to bytecode to run on a virtual machine. It's not that it's not valuable knowledge, they just won't have the context to make meaningful heads or tails of it.

related: I still puke a little remembering the requirement that students work on assignments in emacs on terminal machines rather than their text processor of choice(which was fine for me, but why on god's green earth would you put usability warcrimes like 'hjkl' in the way of someone just starting to learn? No wonder nobody in the early naughts wanted to learn to program...).

[dustyventure]

A lot of people learn to program from declarative languages like spread sheets. We should all be happy we have access to defective versions of assembly at too high a level but be angry that we had to use too low level an editor?

[fijiaarone]

You shouldn’t try any modern programming language until you’ve mastered GOTO and GOSUB and know why lines are numbered in multiples of 10.

[lproven]

I think this is a really important point, even though I suspect you're joking.

Along with all the BS boilerplate text this specific post talks about eliminating, which is great, we simply forget how much legacy tech BS we just assume.

Beginner programmers should not have to know what a "file" is, or what an "editor" is, or that they need an "editor" to "edit" a "file". This is technical debt: these are implementation details which should be invisible.

This goes double for "compilers" versus "interpreters" and "source code" versus "binary code". FFS the noun _code_ means _a system for rendered text unreadable_.

You have a computer. You are talking to it in words, words which resemble English because that is one of the simplest world languages when you think about scripts -- writing systems -- as well as sounds. Hangeul is easier but only works for Korean which is harder than English. Grammatically Chinese is simpler, but spoken Chinese has tones which are very hard, and written Chinese is insane. Typed Cyrillic is no harder but handwritten gets weird and complicated and Russian is much harder than English. And so on.

English wins and so we talk to computers mostly in English.

So, you have a computer, and you type on it in English. That is all you should need to know: how to enter text, how to correct it when you get it wrong, and that is it.

BASIC has a great virtue which all the Unix and even the Lisp fans forget:

It's designed to work at a command prompt. Type a command, the computer does it. Give it a number, it remembers it for later.

This is a profound and important metaphor. It eliminates all the 1960s/1970s legacy BS about "files" and "folders" and "editors" and "compilers". Beginners don't need that. Let them learn that later if they prove to have real aptitude and want to pursue this.

Type a bare expression, the computer does it. Number it, the computer remembers it for later. That is all you need to get writing software.

And just like Python sorted out the problem of spoiled whiny little baby C programmers whinging about their pathetic obsessions with indentation patterns by making indentation semantic so everyone has to comply, line numbers in BASIC are a vital simplifying unifying mechanism, so lean on them: for beginners, make line numbers syntactic.

Don't force kids to learn pro tools like nomenclature and hierarchies. Give them a toy that they can get started with.

At first, they can structure their programs with line numbers, and they learn about leaving space, about RENUMBER commands, about LIST x TO y ranges, and stuff like that, because we are not using a bloody Commodore 64 any more.

But give them IF...THEN...ELSE and WHILE...WEND and REPEAT...UNTIL and named procedures so they can learn structure and not GOTO.

All the rest is baggage and should be deferred as late as reasonably possible.

[kazinator]

The reason we use the words "code" and "coding" how's the history behind it. Originally it referred to translating an algorithm description into machine code. Indeed something less readable. The first compilers were called "automatic coders". I.e. their input wasn't code, their output was. Originally the word "compiling" referred to putting together an image of library functions. Something more similar to linking. The terminology shifted and drifted as time went on.

[anthk]

Emacs doesn't use 'hjkl'. I think you weren't there in the 90's...

[cutler]

Evil mode ;-)