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

submitted 1 week 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 7 points 1 week ago (13 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 1 week ago (6 children)

What language would you suggest?

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 3 points 1 week ago (5 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.

[–] BlueMonday1984@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.

This is only tangential to your point, but I did remember (now-defunct) game studio Zachtronics put out a few games heavily featuring assembly: TIS-100, which directly revolves around programming the titular computer in its own version of assembly, and SHENZHEN I/O, which centers around building embedded systems and programming the microcontrollers contained within.

The company's catalogue is completely free for schools under the Zachademics program, so you could use them to show how assembly programming's like if you were running a school.

[–] froztbyte@awful.systems 3 points 2 days ago

frankly, it's really not a good idea to early-years kids assembly (double especially not fantasy assembly), if your goal is to encourage learning the field. this is why all the strong/popular pi-based educational distros and options focus on stuff like scratch, some light python (often paired with light pygame and turtle), and other low-entry-effort exploratory things like sonic-pi

many do come to explore programming topics in depth later (asm via zach games, other structural/dependency things via satisfactory/factorio, etc), and that's fine too

there is of course a longer-term balance to be struck with (and structural problems coming from) people not understanding the layers below them (cf. current nightmare of tottering piles of javascript and continually worsening app performance everywhere despite having literal supercomputers in our pockets), but "learn asm" is bad starter advice for the same reason that "you should know how to write in c" has been part of why we're in this fucking mess in the first place

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