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Absolutely it is. I'm a believer that learning programming with a high level interpreted language with a weak type system is a disadvantage in the long run. T
by reificator 9y ago
Absolutely it is. I'm a believer that learning programming with a high level interpreted language with a weak type system is a disadvantage in the long run.
That doesn't mesh with people who want to do something valuable out the gate, which is fair enough. But I've seen so many people start with the "easier" path and run into a brick wall they can't surmount later and just give up. It makes me sad to watch every time.
EDIT: Substituted "learning a high level" with "learning programming with a high level"
- icebraining 9y agoI wonder if the transition is the problem, or if some people just have difficulty with the low level stuff, regardless of previous experience. I can't say I have data, but from my college colleagues, I don't remember the people having trouble with, say, pointers being mostly the ones who already programmed in Python or JavaScript.
- reificator 9y agoThat's a good point, and it might indeed be a self-selection kind of thing. I'm not an expert and I don't have the data there. But I don't even mean making a transition, you can do nothing but Python or JS and still hit the wall. Because eventually you'll need to understand the lower level concepts to do better, even with higher level languages and libraries. It's the reason that learning to program, and program well, is not 100x faster than it was 50 years ago, despite all the claimed benefits of this or that language or framework or whatever. Eventually you need to know what's going on under the hood. Also worth noting that I primarily use JS in my day to day work, and it does what I need it to do. Not saying super high level languages aren't useful, just that they're not a good starting point IMO.