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Feel like both languages aren't great first programming languages, but might edge towards Ruby if only for being a strongly typed language. As I explained to a
by yomly 9y ago
Feel like both languages aren't great first programming languages, but might edge towards Ruby if only for being a strongly typed language.
As I explained to a friend who was doing a python data science course, the beauty of Ruby and Python are that they get pretty damn close to the semantics of your code. As such even someone who doesn't understand the language could have a reasonable stab at trying to understand what's going on.
The bad side of this is that that syntactic sugar and other magic obscure what is really going on under the hood and can funnel students down false assumptions about how a language works.
Personally, I'd recommend Scheme as a first language, but apparently that's far too arcane for some...
- dmitri1981 9y agoTotally agree regarding semantics and the problem of too much syntactic sugar. Where JS wins for me, is that you can quickly create something that you can click on and have it do something. From a teaching perspective that kind of interaction and quick feedback is very empowering for students. This experience will quickly inspire students to think "what else can I make this thing do". I appreciate this is not the traditional CS approach, but making things fun for students is key to getting them started coding.