4 ms·

I actually think it's a great first language. Not because of anything intrinsic to the language itself (which I loathe), but because it's hosted on the browser

I actually think it's a great first language. Not because of anything intrinsic to the language itself (which I loathe), but because it's hosted on the browser and has baked-in notions of "making the browser do things". The students get to start learning to program with a language that was created to automate an environment they are comfortable and familiar with. No longer do you need to haze them with ssh-ing into class servers to run a compiler to create executables that interact with the user via the console.

lol768 10y ago
If WebAssembly becomes a viable compilation target for other languages (and browser support is there), would you support the teaching of those too for the same reasons? I think part of this is an issue with academia - the tooling that's recommended tends to be (in my experience as a student) outdated, difficult to use and completely out of touch with what's used in industry. Throughout the whole of my CS degree first year we were editing Java in gedit and compiling it with (an outdated version of) javac! Dependencies were downloaded as JARs and manually added to the classpath. There are so many better tools available, especially for use in teaching. For example, JetBrains have done some really great work on an educational IDE for Python (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/concepts/ https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/concepts/). GitHub offer a whole suite of tools for the classroom. They just don't seem to be used as much as they should. I think Python (combined with some GUI/graphics library) could be really valuable and avoid the whole "console interaction" thing.
- neutronicus 10y ago
  I would, indeed.
- ams6110 10y ago
  The point of real computer science programs is to teach computer science, not specific programming languages or IDEs.

4 ms·

I actually think it's a great first language. Not because of anything intrinsic to the language itself (which I loathe), but because it's hosted on the browser

by neutronicus 10y ago

lol768 10y ago
If WebAssembly becomes a viable compilation target for other languages (and browser support is there), would you support the teaching of those too for the same reasons? I think part of this is an issue with academia - the tooling that's recommended tends to be (in my experience as a student) outdated, difficult to use and completely out of touch with what's used in industry. Throughout the whole of my CS degree first year we were editing Java in gedit and compiling it with (an outdated version of) javac! Dependencies were downloaded as JARs and manually added to the classpath. There are so many better tools available, especially for use in teaching. For example, JetBrains have done some really great work on an educational IDE for Python (https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/concepts/ https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm-edu/concepts/). GitHub offer a whole suite of tools for the classroom. They just don't seem to be used as much as they should. I think Python (combined with some GUI/graphics library) could be really valuable and avoid the whole "console interaction" thing.
- neutronicus 10y ago
  I would, indeed.
- ams6110 10y ago
  The point of real computer science programs is to teach computer science, not specific programming languages or IDEs.