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But “forcing learning early on” is exactly the problem. Approachable languages lead you up their learning curves in small, easy steps. The more knowledge you re

• kungtotte 8y ago
  Agreed. I went back and read the original discussion on HN about this blog post and one commenter phrased it as such: You need to learn and memorise 15 facts to fully grok the Java Hello World snippet (including how to compile and run it), for Python it's only four facts. That's a big difference in cognitive load.
• TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Agreed. When asked, I keep saying that Java is not the best "first language" to teach to a person, because it overwhelms people with concepts from the get-go. A normal person who's sincerely trying to learn, when shown the Hello World will ask about everything - what is this "class" and why it's needed? What does "public", "static" and "void" mean, and why they're written. What "System.out" is? Not to mention, the package declaration at the top of the file. All of those things have reasons for them, but when explaining this to a novice, you'll have to initially handwave most of those reasons away. That seems very uncalled for, especially when the basic abstraction you're trying to teach is that "computer executes simple instructions top to bottom, one at a time, and everything is built out of those simple instructions".