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First, I didn't make it clear that I'm not advocating for introducing types to beginners. I advocate against JavaScript in particular for beginners. Re: 1, yoy
by the_gipsy 7y ago
First, I didn't make it clear that I'm not advocating for introducing types to beginners. I advocate against JavaScript in particular for beginners.
Re: 1, yoy absolutely have to introduce it as soon as you move beyond the most trivial synyax example. Nodejs, browser, whatever you do, the most trivial thing that actually runs somewhere _will_ have callbacks that are run in the event loop queue. Not run in line-order, which is what beginners learn first. Now you have to go down a rabbit whole about the event loop, what and how and when fns gets put on the queue etc etc. Not ideal IMO since it's pretty specific to JS.
2. I buy that it's better than nasty Java, but any weakly typed language applies.
So yea, Python is probably the best in terms of easiness and less paradigm-specific cruft.
- Bahamut 7y agoI personally found JS much easier and accessible than Python, but YMMV. I tried a number of different languages when I first started seriously pursuing a job in dev - C++, PHP, Ruby, Python, and eventually I settled on JS. JS let me quickly get something working while being able to understand what was going on. The other platforms had various barriers that made it difficult to focus on what I wanted to do because I had to know a ton of other things first, or to accept not knowing how something functioned (especially true with Rails). The only real gotcha I really had struggled with in my first year as a professional dev was reference variables, but that is a gotcha you could run into in most standard languages and not unique to JavaScript.
- the_gipsy 7y agoElm, the language of the article, does not have refs :)