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We should rethink how we teach people to code (deadsimpletech.com)

submitted 4 days ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

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Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

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[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (10 children)

Short version is that 10-15 years ago, when I was a student, it had the same “vibe” as vibe coding has today, i.e. the promise of easy implementation, but with the final product being sloppy, unreadable and buggy.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago (4 children)

What language would you suggest?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Great question that I don’t have a good answer to. My bit about python was more just a throwaway joke that was also supposed to indicate that my own opinions aren’t sufficient to write the linked article.

Here are some wrong answers, but with reasons for and none against:

Assembly: really gets you to understand that you are contending with a computer chip, and that anything interesting that you want to do requires abstraction.
C: similar to the above, but also gets you to understand some of the fundamental aspects of programming languages, mostly memory.
Perl: if you’re willing to teach python, why not Perl? Less readable, more magic, fun language to play golf with, so tutorial exercises could be fun.

By coincidence, these are the first three languages that I encountered as a CS student with no preexisting knowledge of programming (not in this order).

Anyway, for something approaching a real suggestion: Dart/Flutter could be an interesting choice, for some of the reasons given in the article for HTML. I haven’t given this much thought so this might still be a bad answer. Also this is the language I’m using at work right now.

[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago

Gotcha. It's still a fun question to think about though.

My uni switched from teaching their intro classes in Java to python the year before I started, and in defense of python, I have to say: it's so simple for small things, that it gets out of the way in the classroom. Sure, it's not great for big projects, but it is very easy to demonstrate concepts in a readable manner.

(That was the second program I enrolled in, btw. The first one, at another uni, they started with Haskell. No joke. And while I do appreciate Haskell and functional languages in general now, maybe in part due to this, it just got in the way of the concepts they were actually trying to teach.)

But in any case: uni isn't really there to teach you to code. That's something you are supposed to pick up on along the way, or on the job.

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