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by AnimalMuppet 543 days ago
As mongol said in a top-level comment, Java isn't a great language for programming "in the small". It's not a great language for a casual user - or rather, there are languages that are significantly better. If you want to introduce someone to programming in a semester course, "public static void main" isn't going to be a significant hurdle. If you want to introduce someone to programming as a 14-year-old, maybe don't start with Java.
1 comments
gf000 542 days ago
Why? Java is a small language with not many concepts, that is typed so many of your first attempts will be caught with helpful messages at compile time, and it fails safely at runtime with error messages pointing to an exact line number. Besides, it is a language that is actually used in the industry and has one of the biggest ecosystems. It's also plenty performant, can be low-level enough for learning about all kinds of data structures/algorithms, including concurrent ones and has probably the best tooling (IDE, debugger, etc)

What other language would you start with?

And isn't it easier to introduce concepts one at a time? For that reason implicit classes makes sense, and also for the occasional scripting, as in doing something one-off, but it is not as trivial that I can do it with piping 3 commands together.

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AnimalMuppet 542 days ago
> Java is a small language with not many concepts

True. But you need to know too many of them to get anything to run.

> that is typed so many of your first attempts will be caught with helpful messages at compile time

But it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't feel "helpful", it feels nitpicky. It feels like I have to get everything exactly right before anything will run. For a raw beginner, that's very frustrating. It is (emotionally) better to have something run as far as it can run, and then crash. (I agree that exceptions pointing to the line number are very nice.)

Again, for a semester class, the startup overhead for learning Java is too small to worry about - it's maybe a day or two. But for someone on their own, not in a class, a day or two is a huge investment to put in before they can get something running!

What would I start with? Something with a REPL. (It could be a language that is normally compiled, but there needs to be a REPL. Raw beginners need to be able to get something, anything, to work as quickly as possible.)

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