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Yes and no, it's true that there is a lot of cruft in setting up a portable write-compile-debug cycle for C with often not very helpful error messages. On the o
by iammyIP 9y ago
Yes and no, it's true that there is a lot of cruft in setting up a portable write-compile-debug cycle for C with often not very helpful error messages. On the other hand you could just use an online compiler in a browser. And demonstrate all the other fun stuff on a chalk board. People that really want to go low-level then can figure it out, since they learned the terminology and the basic principles behind.
Most of the 'fun & exciting' is part of the teacher responsibility and how he/she/it teaches, as i would argue that the basics of how our stuff works is by default even more exciting than learning to use an arbitrary api of some one button click framework.
The article points in the right direction, it's just not enough.
- jdmichal 9y agoHonestly, the decision of a first language doesn't even matter that much. Beginners need to learn how to program, by which I mean understanding and writing sequential logic. This is by far the biggest barrier. Without it, you get "wizard" programmers: Those who copy-paste magical incantations with no understanding of even the basic underlying logical flow. You can use any language to teach this, but it should absolutely be the primary focus for absolute beginners. And it really doesn't matter what you use, because even in C or C++ you should not be providing skeleton code with all the boilerplate and complete build scripts.