5 ms·

My Students Laugh, HaHa, Laugh, at the HN Naysayers ;)

20 points by saundby 16y ago

aphyr 16y ago
Java isn't impossible for students to learn. I suggest, however, that it is not the best choice; because when it comes to learning how to program you want a language which is maximally expressive with a minimal amount of work. It artificially restricts the problem space you can tackle by making simple things more complicated than they need to be. When you're writing an algorithm to count words in a file, would you prefer string = File.read 'path' or StringBuffer fileData = new StringBuffer(1000); BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader( new FileReader("path")); char[] buf = new char[1024]; int numRead=0; while((numRead=reader.read(buf)) != -1){ String readData = String.valueOf(buf, 0, numRead); fileData.append(readData); buf = new char[1024]; } reader.close(); string = fileData.toString(); How about introducing anonymous functions? How much time will it take you to explain the intricacies of creating an anonymous subclass whose only purpose for existence is to encapsulate a single instance with a single method, inside which all variables from the containing scope must be marked as final? Or would you prefer something like Smalltalk? [ :x | x * x ] value: 2 Sure, students can wrap their heads around both. But the important thing is the concept, not the expression. After all, if they go on to program in the real world, they'll be adapting their knowledge to different languages.
- kotrin 16y ago
  "But the important thing is the concept, not the expression" Nailed it.
- DanielRibeiro 16y ago
  Not to mention that the type system in Java is always surprising. List<Integer> is not a List<Number> but Integer[] is a Number[] (which can throw ArrayStoreException as covariance makes no sense on mutable collections - ref: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html ) And compare smalltalks' (and ruby's and python's) everything is an object to Java's: there are some primtive things, and null is not an object. Don't get me wrong: java is very taughtable to beginners. The basic usage is ok, while cumbersome. But Java shows its deep issues when you start using it for more serious stuff.
jerf 16y ago
Am I supposed to be impressed by 55 minutes to cover "Hello World"? That proves the point that Java is a bad starter language, it's not evidence against it! Python would do that in about 5, and then instead of working on the irrelevant details of Java you could be teaching programming. (They will never need to know the other stuff you covered. The soonest the 8th graders could graduate college with a computer science degree is 2019 or 2020 and Java will be far from dominant by then. All irrelevant and not even all that educational.) Your students have no ability whatsoever to judge complexity. What are they comparing it to? You want to play fair about quoting students and beating "HN" over the head with your students quotes? Next class period, do the Python equivalent, then ask them which is "more complex". Then tell us what happens. (And if you lead them on enough, you can convince them to say they prefer Java. They aren't stupid, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. By that age they know what to do to get good grades. So I'd ask you that you play it as straight as you can, if you're serious about this.)
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  They aren't stupid, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. Indeed. When I was merely nine I had a teacher who got mad at the class for some reason and decided to punish us all by making us memorize a list of all the prepositions in English, to be regurgitated -- in alphabetical order -- on a quiz. So I did. I still remember them all, in alphabetical order, several decades later. [1] Of course kids can learn things. Those who aren't inclined to just blow school off may well be better at memorizing arbitrary rules than adults are. For one thing, they aren't always experienced enough to tell the difference between a useful educational exercise and a complete waste of time. --- [1] Actually, I believe my mental list may be missing some prepositions. And that really makes me angry.
- saundby 16y ago
  I'm not stupid either, and I can tell a response that's intended to please me from one that's sincere. My students are encouraged to tell me when I'm boring them and when something I'm doing in class just plain sucks. You're missing the point of the question. I don't ask them to compare complexity against other languages they don't know. They were asked whether this was too complex for the class, judging against other subjects we've covered. Some of my lessons have been too much for them. They've let me know. Others have moved too slowly, or not given them enough credit for being able to take new things on, they've let me know that, too. That evaluation is part of the class, we do it all the time. I experiment with the class, and they enjoy that since they know their feedback is part of what builds the class. Rather, it appears you're inferring things that you'd like to infer about the class that support your feelings. As to python, we'll be doing python in May for a short while, as well as C and ruby. And we will be rating each. We'll be re-implementing some things that we implement in Java in those other languages as a way of giving them a test drive, trying out not just the syntactic differences but the differences in approach to solving problems with the different languages. We'll also revisit LOGO (but not LISP, I've gotten clear messages from my students in the past that they don't find that productive to cover, though they appreciate me taking the time to describe it after we've done some LISP-ish things in LOGO.) You also seem to think I teach Java as the be-all and end-all language. And that I presume it will be the only language they ever learn. In fact, I add a lot of humor to the class by poking fun at Java's problems (you know that humor helps learning, right?) While we spend the most class time with Java of any language (though we just started today), we've had lessons using assembly language, machine language, BASIC, and LOGO already this year, plus an extensive section using HTML. After we finish the section using Java, we'll add more languages as I said above. OK, so you tell me, what is the hot language of 2019? I'm teaching learning processes, so that my students can learn whatever languages they want. I'm starting a fire under them so that they have enough of an interest to bother. I am very serious about this. I teach these classes because I want to. I'm not filling time or filling checklists on an academic record. These aren't programming classes. These are general computer classes, which I'm trying to use to get students interested in taking programming classes when they move on to college, so I think you're misjudging my scope and the nature of the students. The students in my class get good grades whether they agree with me or not. If they go along to get along, it will not get them a good grade, more likely the opposite. I don't need their agreement to stroke my ego. I've got work I've done in outer space as well as in a large fraction of the world's aircraft. I don't teach for egoboo, I teach because I want these kids to learn that they don't have to sit in front of a game console running a controller because that's all they're allowed to access in this world. I want them to learn to take things apart, turn them around, and build their own things. I don't like them being trapped outside the package, stuck behind the UI, cut off from tools. The programming I teach isn't taught to learn how to create elegant algorithms or to discuss programming paradigms. It's taught as a practical method for putting tools in their hands and helping them make the transition from consumer to creator. Focusing too heavily on what specific language is used at this level is unproductive. So long as the language used meets some basic constraints that many languages will meet. I put on some additional constraints. For example, I want to teach a language that's used in the real world, not a packaged educational language licensed with a boxed learning program. I can't control what systems the students have at home. I want a language that works the same way at home as at school. I also want standard graphics and sound libraries since pictures and sounds motivate students as well as being useful to illustrate what's happening with data in programs. I have a number of constraints. At this point, Java does the job. What I addressed was the assertion that Java is too complex to use in teaching beginners. Not whether there is no simpler language for expressing "Hello, world!" Your estimate of how long it takes to cover anything, with meaning, in class is pretty optimistic. And as to what they need to know, and why they need to know it, I think you need to approach things from a higher perspective. The point here is not to simply teach mechanics of a particular language. What the computer is up to, why, and what the student can do to control it is the point, not how quickly we can get a few characters on the screen.
techiferous 16y ago
When I taught Java (some years ago) I used Karel J. Robot. It was a great way to teach both Java and OOP. http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/KarelJava2ed/Karel++JavaEdition.html http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/KarelJava2ed/Karel++JavaEdition...
- liuhenry 16y ago
  Karel's great, it's how I first learned Java. Cuts down on all of the unnecessary stuff and boilerplate, and presents an easy way to learn programming logic and theory. If anyone's looking for a good intro course to OOP and Java, CS106A at Stanford is great, and the lecture videos and course material is online: http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=824a47e1-135f-4508-a5aa-866adcae1111 http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=824a47e1-13...
- saundby 16y ago
  I use the Karel J Robot examples with Greenfoot in my middle school classes once we start using Greenfoot. It's a great tool.
callahad 16y ago
I have no doubt that you can get 11-14 year olds to understand Java's Hello World in a single hour, but understanding a pre-written snippet of code is a wholly different beast from being able to make appropriate predictions and inferences based on knowledge gleaned from that code. Could your students explain how main() was called? Could they create their own functions and invoke them based on what they had learned? And how forgiving would Java be of minor errors, say, creating class a class named HelloWorld inside a file named Hello.java? Why does the filename even matter, if the class's name is defined right inside the file, or vice versa? And if the class is in a block inside the file, why can't they just create another block like the first one and have two classes in the same file? Why do they type 'javac HelloWorld.java', but not 'java HelloWorld.class'? How can java find the HelloWorld class if you're not pointing it to the class file? Why is 'javac' so damn picky about the file name matching the class name when you don't point 'java' to any files at all? Seriously, there's a ton of voodoo in there. Things break in surprising ways, and it's hard to synthesize new knowledge based on prior experience. Take Python, on the other hand. You can address things in a much more controlled order, with each step yielding practical information, starting with print("Hello, world") which tells the students how to call a function, and pass it an argument. Every other time they call a function or pass it an argument will look like this. Then you can show them how to make their own function: def hello(): print("Hello, world") But nothing gets printed? Hey! You've just explained defining a function, and based on the previous example, they can probably suggest how to invoke hello(). At this point, they can easily make and call new functions of their own. Then you can go on to introduce the basics of OOP: class Greeter(): def __init__(self, name): self.name = name def say_hello(self): print("Hello, " + self.name) Sure, the "self" is a little magical there, but hey, you're comparing this to Java. Plus, you've got an interactive console that you can jump into and poke at the darn thing. Hey, what do I get when I say g = Greeter("Saundby")? Oh a "Greeter object". That makes sense. What can I do with it? Well, we made a say_hello, so what's g.say_hello? Oh, a "method Greeter.say_hello of <Greeter object>." And hey, it's the same Greeter object as g! What if the students want to make a new class? They just put it in the same file, like you would expect. What if they want to rename the class? They just do it. And you run it with "python filename.py" which appears to work exactly like how every other command that operates on files. There's no explicit compilation step to forget or trip over. Yes, you can teach kids to read and understand a Java program, but what do you gain by handicapping yourself and foregoing the pedagogical tools, like an interactive console, available elsewhere? Similarly, what do they gain by being deprived of such a wonderful and frictionless means of exploring and experimenting with the language?
jarin 16y ago
I think the fact that it took 30 minutes to get through a Hello World program is pretty telling. Here's how I would teach 8th graders using Ruby: puts "Hello World" Ok cool, 5 minutes. Now let's learn about loops and conditional statements! Edit: I absolutely do not think there's anything inherently wrong with Java, or with kids learning Java. I just think it's better to show them why programming is awesome first ("Look, you totally just made the computer do your algebra homework for you!") and THEN get into more complex (i.e. harder to debug) languages once they have a firm grasp of the basics like conditional logic, loops, objects, etc.
ztan 16y ago
>p.s.-I love Hacker News myself, and take all my students there to open it up to them. I have nothing against middle school students. I like kids. I also think exposing HN to kids at an early age is a great idea. However something about that idea bothers me and makes me feel uneasy. I'm not quite able to put my finger on it. Anyone else feel the same way?
- saundby 16y ago
  I show HN and YC to my middle school students and tell them a little about it. I just want them to see it. They'd rather spend time reading snopes if that makes you feel any better. ;) The only time I've heard of a middle school kid going back on his own was when one kid showed it to his dad, who was thinking about starting his own business. I spend more time going over HN and YC with my high school students. I don't have time to teach them how to do their own start-up in class. But I want them to be exposed to the idea, and know some places to go for more info if they take to the idea, want to learn why I've ruined their life by teaching them Java, or whatever. :)
mcasaje 16y ago
I feel that the blog is more about demonstrating against the fact that Java is too complex as a beginner language, not on how Java is the simplest, quickest, or even easiest, because of course it's not. All these comments make valid points, but as a person who has learnt Java as his first language feel that it opened me up to learning other languages quicker because of that fact that I found languages like Python much simpler, whilst I find many 1st-language Python students to be much more defensive and 'clingy' to Python because of its simplicity and directness. While Python may be an easier language, I find that it is more difficult to debug than Java at times due to incompatible spacing alone, but that's beside the point. I think that students should be able to decide their first language. I was 'stuck' with Java, but I don't regret it at all. In fact, after having transferred to another university with students having started with Python, I find that I'm ahead in terms of concepts dealing with OOP. I know that Python can do this as well, but Java (for better or for worse) shoves it down your throat. So can't we all just get along? :)
Jach 16y ago
So I looked at his main() post ( http://beginwithjava.blogspot.com/2008/06/main.html http://beginwithjava.blogspot.com/2008/06/main.html ), and found his explanation for static: static says that this is the one and only main() method for this entire class (or program). You can't have multiple main()s. If you leave this out, you'll get an error since it could be possible for there to be multiple instances of main() otherwise. No wonder his students had trouble with it, this is just flat-out wrong (on every claim). I'm not a fan of his explanation about "an array of Strings" (there is none), though perhaps he covers that better in class? The "By the way you can type args[] instead of String[] args" seemed completely unnecessary. Hello World in Java is brought up as an example of how complicated Java is on the outset, not to say that it's impossible to learn for a beginner. The problem with Java's Hello World is that in order to completely, correctly understand it all you have to know a lot more about Java, OOP, and its interactions with itself and the system. The HTML strawman doesn't require such outside knowledge to completely understand (and there are people who claim it's verbose, that's why we have templates and HAML and tag-name() functions and so on); the <html> tag, <head> tag, etc. can be explained as helping the browser find information, and if you wanted to start off real simple (if not standard) a modern browser will render simply <h1>Hello world!</h1> by itself, no html, no title, nothing else, just fine, and you can go from there. There is no simpler Hello World in Java.
- saundby 16y ago
  Yeah, I agree my description of static needs to be changed on that page. It's not what I use in class. I teach static from a general standpoint of stating belonging to the class rather than an object of that class. For didactic purposes, sometimes you phrase what-ifs in odd ways to get the point across. Still, wrong on every claim? How many main()s do you put in your classes? Do you leave static out of your main() signature without getting an error in compilation? I appreciate corrections, but can we avoid hyperbole? As to the HTML, if I'd used the bare header tags with text the counter argument would be that I'm not teaching proper HTML. Plus, brevity masquerading as simplicity is not the purpose of the lesson. The point that HTML is seldom treated as too complex for beginners is the real point here. Yet it gets pretty complex pretty quickly. The students handle it.

20 points by saundby 16y ago

aphyr 16y ago

Java isn't impossible for students to learn. I suggest, however, that it is not the best choice; because when it comes to learning how to program you want a language which is maximally expressive with a minimal amount of work. It artificially restricts the problem space you can tackle by making simple things more complicated than they need to be. When you're writing an algorithm to count words in a file, would you prefer string = File.read 'path' or StringBuffer fileData = new StringBuffer(1000); BufferedReader reader = new BufferedReader( new FileReader("path")); char[] buf = new char[1024]; int numRead=0; while((numRead=reader.read(buf)) != -1){ String readData = String.valueOf(buf, 0, numRead); fileData.append(readData); buf = new char[1024]; } reader.close(); string = fileData.toString(); How about introducing anonymous functions? How much time will it take you to explain the intricacies of creating an anonymous subclass whose only purpose for existence is to encapsulate a single instance with a single method, inside which all variables from the containing scope must be marked as final? Or would you prefer something like Smalltalk? [ :x | x * x ] value: 2 Sure, students can wrap their heads around both. But the important thing is the concept, not the expression. After all, if they go on to program in the real world, they'll be adapting their knowledge to different languages.

kotrin 16y ago
"But the important thing is the concept, not the expression" Nailed it.
DanielRibeiro 16y ago
Not to mention that the type system in Java is always surprising. List<Integer> is not a List<Number> but Integer[] is a Number[] (which can throw ArrayStoreException as covariance makes no sense on mutable collections - ref: http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html http://programming-scala.labs.oreilly.com/ch12.html ) And compare smalltalks' (and ruby's and python's) everything is an object to Java's: there are some primtive things, and null is not an object. Don't get me wrong: java is very taughtable to beginners. The basic usage is ok, while cumbersome. But Java shows its deep issues when you start using it for more serious stuff.

jerf 16y ago

Am I supposed to be impressed by 55 minutes to cover "Hello World"? That proves the point that Java is a bad starter language, it's not evidence against it! Python would do that in about 5, and then instead of working on the irrelevant details of Java you could be teaching programming. (They will never need to know the other stuff you covered. The soonest the 8th graders could graduate college with a computer science degree is 2019 or 2020 and Java will be far from dominant by then. All irrelevant and not even all that educational.) Your students have no ability whatsoever to judge complexity. What are they comparing it to? You want to play fair about quoting students and beating "HN" over the head with your students quotes? Next class period, do the Python equivalent, then ask them which is "more complex". Then tell us what happens. (And if you lead them on enough, you can convince them to say they prefer Java. They aren't stupid, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. By that age they know what to do to get good grades. So I'd ask you that you play it as straight as you can, if you're serious about this.)

mechanical_fish 16y ago
They aren't stupid, and they'll say whatever you want them to say. Indeed. When I was merely nine I had a teacher who got mad at the class for some reason and decided to punish us all by making us memorize a list of all the prepositions in English, to be regurgitated -- in alphabetical order -- on a quiz. So I did. I still remember them all, in alphabetical order, several decades later. [1] Of course kids can learn things. Those who aren't inclined to just blow school off may well be better at memorizing arbitrary rules than adults are. For one thing, they aren't always experienced enough to tell the difference between a useful educational exercise and a complete waste of time. --- [1] Actually, I believe my mental list may be missing some prepositions. And that really makes me angry.
saundby 16y ago
I'm not stupid either, and I can tell a response that's intended to please me from one that's sincere. My students are encouraged to tell me when I'm boring them and when something I'm doing in class just plain sucks. You're missing the point of the question. I don't ask them to compare complexity against other languages they don't know. They were asked whether this was too complex for the class, judging against other subjects we've covered. Some of my lessons have been too much for them. They've let me know. Others have moved too slowly, or not given them enough credit for being able to take new things on, they've let me know that, too. That evaluation is part of the class, we do it all the time. I experiment with the class, and they enjoy that since they know their feedback is part of what builds the class. Rather, it appears you're inferring things that you'd like to infer about the class that support your feelings. As to python, we'll be doing python in May for a short while, as well as C and ruby. And we will be rating each. We'll be re-implementing some things that we implement in Java in those other languages as a way of giving them a test drive, trying out not just the syntactic differences but the differences in approach to solving problems with the different languages. We'll also revisit LOGO (but not LISP, I've gotten clear messages from my students in the past that they don't find that productive to cover, though they appreciate me taking the time to describe it after we've done some LISP-ish things in LOGO.) You also seem to think I teach Java as the be-all and end-all language. And that I presume it will be the only language they ever learn. In fact, I add a lot of humor to the class by poking fun at Java's problems (you know that humor helps learning, right?) While we spend the most class time with Java of any language (though we just started today), we've had lessons using assembly language, machine language, BASIC, and LOGO already this year, plus an extensive section using HTML. After we finish the section using Java, we'll add more languages as I said above. OK, so you tell me, what is the hot language of 2019? I'm teaching learning processes, so that my students can learn whatever languages they want. I'm starting a fire under them so that they have enough of an interest to bother. I am very serious about this. I teach these classes because I want to. I'm not filling time or filling checklists on an academic record. These aren't programming classes. These are general computer classes, which I'm trying to use to get students interested in taking programming classes when they move on to college, so I think you're misjudging my scope and the nature of the students. The students in my class get good grades whether they agree with me or not. If they go along to get along, it will not get them a good grade, more likely the opposite. I don't need their agreement to stroke my ego. I've got work I've done in outer space as well as in a large fraction of the world's aircraft. I don't teach for egoboo, I teach because I want these kids to learn that they don't have to sit in front of a game console running a controller because that's all they're allowed to access in this world. I want them to learn to take things apart, turn them around, and build their own things. I don't like them being trapped outside the package, stuck behind the UI, cut off from tools. The programming I teach isn't taught to learn how to create elegant algorithms or to discuss programming paradigms. It's taught as a practical method for putting tools in their hands and helping them make the transition from consumer to creator. Focusing too heavily on what specific language is used at this level is unproductive. So long as the language used meets some basic constraints that many languages will meet. I put on some additional constraints. For example, I want to teach a language that's used in the real world, not a packaged educational language licensed with a boxed learning program. I can't control what systems the students have at home. I want a language that works the same way at home as at school. I also want standard graphics and sound libraries since pictures and sounds motivate students as well as being useful to illustrate what's happening with data in programs. I have a number of constraints. At this point, Java does the job. What I addressed was the assertion that Java is too complex to use in teaching beginners. Not whether there is no simpler language for expressing "Hello, world!" Your estimate of how long it takes to cover anything, with meaning, in class is pretty optimistic. And as to what they need to know, and why they need to know it, I think you need to approach things from a higher perspective. The point here is not to simply teach mechanics of a particular language. What the computer is up to, why, and what the student can do to control it is the point, not how quickly we can get a few characters on the screen.

techiferous 16y ago

When I taught Java (some years ago) I used Karel J. Robot. It was a great way to teach both Java and OOP. http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/KarelJava2ed/Karel++JavaEdition.html http://csis.pace.edu/~bergin/KarelJava2ed/Karel++JavaEdition...

liuhenry 16y ago
Karel's great, it's how I first learned Java. Cuts down on all of the unnecessary stuff and boilerplate, and presents an easy way to learn programming logic and theory. If anyone's looking for a good intro course to OOP and Java, CS106A at Stanford is great, and the lecture videos and course material is online: http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=824a47e1-135f-4508-a5aa-866adcae1111 http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=824a47e1-13...
saundby 16y ago
I use the Karel J Robot examples with Greenfoot in my middle school classes once we start using Greenfoot. It's a great tool.

callahad 16y ago

I have no doubt that you can get 11-14 year olds to understand Java's Hello World in a single hour, but understanding a pre-written snippet of code is a wholly different beast from being able to make appropriate predictions and inferences based on knowledge gleaned from that code. Could your students explain how main() was called? Could they create their own functions and invoke them based on what they had learned? And how forgiving would Java be of minor errors, say, creating class a class named HelloWorld inside a file named Hello.java? Why does the filename even matter, if the class's name is defined right inside the file, or vice versa? And if the class is in a block inside the file, why can't they just create another block like the first one and have two classes in the same file? Why do they type 'javac HelloWorld.java', but not 'java HelloWorld.class'? How can java find the HelloWorld class if you're not pointing it to the class file? Why is 'javac' so damn picky about the file name matching the class name when you don't point 'java' to any files at all? Seriously, there's a ton of voodoo in there. Things break in surprising ways, and it's hard to synthesize new knowledge based on prior experience. Take Python, on the other hand. You can address things in a much more controlled order, with each step yielding practical information, starting with print("Hello, world") which tells the students how to call a function, and pass it an argument. Every other time they call a function or pass it an argument will look like this. Then you can show them how to make their own function: def hello(): print("Hello, world") But nothing gets printed? Hey! You've just explained defining a function, and based on the previous example, they can probably suggest how to invoke hello(). At this point, they can easily make and call new functions of their own. Then you can go on to introduce the basics of OOP: class Greeter(): def __init__(self, name): self.name = name def say_hello(self): print("Hello, " + self.name) Sure, the "self" is a little magical there, but hey, you're comparing this to Java. Plus, you've got an interactive console that you can jump into and poke at the darn thing. Hey, what do I get when I say g = Greeter("Saundby")? Oh a "Greeter object". That makes sense. What can I do with it? Well, we made a say_hello, so what's g.say_hello? Oh, a "method Greeter.say_hello of <Greeter object>." And hey, it's the same Greeter object as g! What if the students want to make a new class? They just put it in the same file, like you would expect. What if they want to rename the class? They just do it. And you run it with "python filename.py" which appears to work exactly like how every other command that operates on files. There's no explicit compilation step to forget or trip over. Yes, you can teach kids to read and understand a Java program, but what do you gain by handicapping yourself and foregoing the pedagogical tools, like an interactive console, available elsewhere? Similarly, what do they gain by being deprived of such a wonderful and frictionless means of exploring and experimenting with the language?

jarin 16y ago

I think the fact that it took 30 minutes to get through a Hello World program is pretty telling. Here's how I would teach 8th graders using Ruby: puts "Hello World" Ok cool, 5 minutes. Now let's learn about loops and conditional statements! Edit: I absolutely do not think there's anything inherently wrong with Java, or with kids learning Java. I just think it's better to show them why programming is awesome first ("Look, you totally just made the computer do your algebra homework for you!") and THEN get into more complex (i.e. harder to debug) languages once they have a firm grasp of the basics like conditional logic, loops, objects, etc.

ztan 16y ago

>p.s.-I love Hacker News myself, and take all my students there to open it up to them. I have nothing against middle school students. I like kids. I also think exposing HN to kids at an early age is a great idea. However something about that idea bothers me and makes me feel uneasy. I'm not quite able to put my finger on it. Anyone else feel the same way?

saundby 16y ago
I show HN and YC to my middle school students and tell them a little about it. I just want them to see it. They'd rather spend time reading snopes if that makes you feel any better. ;) The only time I've heard of a middle school kid going back on his own was when one kid showed it to his dad, who was thinking about starting his own business. I spend more time going over HN and YC with my high school students. I don't have time to teach them how to do their own start-up in class. But I want them to be exposed to the idea, and know some places to go for more info if they take to the idea, want to learn why I've ruined their life by teaching them Java, or whatever. :)

mcasaje 16y ago

I feel that the blog is more about demonstrating against the fact that Java is too complex as a beginner language, not on how Java is the simplest, quickest, or even easiest, because of course it's not. All these comments make valid points, but as a person who has learnt Java as his first language feel that it opened me up to learning other languages quicker because of that fact that I found languages like Python much simpler, whilst I find many 1st-language Python students to be much more defensive and 'clingy' to Python because of its simplicity and directness. While Python may be an easier language, I find that it is more difficult to debug than Java at times due to incompatible spacing alone, but that's beside the point. I think that students should be able to decide their first language. I was 'stuck' with Java, but I don't regret it at all. In fact, after having transferred to another university with students having started with Python, I find that I'm ahead in terms of concepts dealing with OOP. I know that Python can do this as well, but Java (for better or for worse) shoves it down your throat. So can't we all just get along? :)

Jach 16y ago

So I looked at his main() post ( http://beginwithjava.blogspot.com/2008/06/main.html http://beginwithjava.blogspot.com/2008/06/main.html ), and found his explanation for static: static says that this is the one and only main() method for this entire class (or program). You can't have multiple main()s. If you leave this out, you'll get an error since it could be possible for there to be multiple instances of main() otherwise. No wonder his students had trouble with it, this is just flat-out wrong (on every claim). I'm not a fan of his explanation about "an array of Strings" (there is none), though perhaps he covers that better in class? The "By the way you can type args[] instead of String[] args" seemed completely unnecessary. Hello World in Java is brought up as an example of how complicated Java is on the outset, not to say that it's impossible to learn for a beginner. The problem with Java's Hello World is that in order to completely, correctly understand it all you have to know a lot more about Java, OOP, and its interactions with itself and the system. The HTML strawman doesn't require such outside knowledge to completely understand (and there are people who claim it's verbose, that's why we have templates and HAML and tag-name() functions and so on); the <html> tag, <head> tag, etc. can be explained as helping the browser find information, and if you wanted to start off real simple (if not standard) a modern browser will render simply <h1>Hello world!</h1> by itself, no html, no title, nothing else, just fine, and you can go from there. There is no simpler Hello World in Java.

saundby 16y ago
Yeah, I agree my description of static needs to be changed on that page. It's not what I use in class. I teach static from a general standpoint of stating belonging to the class rather than an object of that class. For didactic purposes, sometimes you phrase what-ifs in odd ways to get the point across. Still, wrong on every claim? How many main()s do you put in your classes? Do you leave static out of your main() signature without getting an error in compilation? I appreciate corrections, but can we avoid hyperbole? As to the HTML, if I'd used the bare header tags with text the counter argument would be that I'm not teaching proper HTML. Plus, brevity masquerading as simplicity is not the purpose of the lesson. The point that HTML is seldom treated as too complex for beginners is the real point here. Yet it gets pretty complex pretty quickly. The students handle it.