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Having designed programming curriculum, I have to disagree that the language is a bad language for beginners (though it is very far from ideal). To be fair the

Having designed programming curriculum, I have to disagree that the language is a bad language for beginners (though it is very far from ideal). To be fair the primary reason is not really a virtue of Javascript per se, but the fact that it runs in the browser is a large pedagogical gain that no other language can easily match and is hard to overstate. Learning to program is overwhelming for most students, and setting up your environment is a major component of that. Being able to run your code natively in the browser is a huge boon. Even better, having that code immediately be useable in a very real sense boosts motivation significantly. For most students it really is preferable to let students get very comfortable with basic code constructs before having to interact with the underlying system in any meaningful way. At the language level, Javascript also has some nice affordances that let you treat constructs as simpler than they are in your curriculum and expand on them later. I think the best example of this is `var`. Viewing variables as uncomplicated "buckets" that happily contain any data you want to shove in them is a good starting place when introducing the very first building blocks of something like if/else control flow. Most languages are built with semi-experienced programmers in mind and are ill-suited for many beginners and actively bad for children. As an easy example: as a developer I like seeing type specifications for numbers, but pedagogically having to introduce the difference between ints and floats on the first day is just empirically confusing for most students. Much better for them to be "magic" until you can properly motivate them to care (which can be just a few weeks in!) I could write on this topic far longer than I have, but the short of it is that Javascript has done a truly surprising number of things right for a teaching language. I'd still love to remove some of the zany examples here if I could though.

jonny_eh 5y ago
I wonder if Typescript would make a great first language, since a subset of it runs in the browser, but the IDE and compiler can prevent some very bad bugs.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  It might be a good extension after they'd spent a good amount of time in plain Javascript, 50-200 hours in depending on age IMO (younger -> more). Adding types is, again, confusing to most beginning students and adding any sort of build process is asking for tears. The bugs, while unpleasant, just aren't actually that bad pedagogically. Students readily accept explanations of the form "computers are dumb and do what you tell them, if you tell them to do something that doesn't make sense they will do something that doesn't make sense" which is close enough to correct to not give them a terrible mental that is difficult to unlearn later. Additionally, at this stage of learning students should be writing many small programs. Such programs are typically easy for teaching aids to debug in seconds (or to suggest a radically simplified re-write).
ozim 5y ago
For starters it is maybe great, but I see problem with types that are not explained but create problems when building something more. Because in the end `var` is not just a bucket and adding strings to number bites people. It is like learning how to snowboard, I am now on a level where I can go downhill quite quickly, but I don't have enough experience to not crash if something unexpected pops up. Learning with `var` is just a bucket seems to be that it is going to cause a lot of frustration and pain later on when person thinks he gets it.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  Of course these technicalities can be a problem, but our conversation here is about absolute beginners, sometimes children engaging in a structured curriculum where the problems they face are ones in our control. In that context it's ok to oversimplify if we 1. Tell the student we're oversimplifying, and maintain their trust in us so that they'll follow along when we do so. 2. Revisit oversimplified explanations when they have enough knowledge and context to understand more detailed and correct explanation. The point I've been making is that Javascript makes it easy to pace our explanations of complex programming topics while still allowing students to consistently writing working code. Most languages require a large amounts of either upfront understanding or faith in "magic incantations", both of which hinder learning (this is not a criticism of those languages, they were designed for professionals). So Javascript still manages pretty admirably, all things considered.

jonny_eh 5y ago

I wonder if Typescript would make a great first language, since a subset of it runs in the browser, but the IDE and compiler can prevent some very bad bugs.

Hermitian909 5y ago
It might be a good extension after they'd spent a good amount of time in plain Javascript, 50-200 hours in depending on age IMO (younger -> more). Adding types is, again, confusing to most beginning students and adding any sort of build process is asking for tears. The bugs, while unpleasant, just aren't actually that bad pedagogically. Students readily accept explanations of the form "computers are dumb and do what you tell them, if you tell them to do something that doesn't make sense they will do something that doesn't make sense" which is close enough to correct to not give them a terrible mental that is difficult to unlearn later. Additionally, at this stage of learning students should be writing many small programs. Such programs are typically easy for teaching aids to debug in seconds (or to suggest a radically simplified re-write).

ozim 5y ago

For starters it is maybe great, but I see problem with types that are not explained but create problems when building something more. Because in the end `var` is not just a bucket and adding strings to number bites people. It is like learning how to snowboard, I am now on a level where I can go downhill quite quickly, but I don't have enough experience to not crash if something unexpected pops up. Learning with `var` is just a bucket seems to be that it is going to cause a lot of frustration and pain later on when person thinks he gets it.

Hermitian909 5y ago
Of course these technicalities can be a problem, but our conversation here is about absolute beginners, sometimes children engaging in a structured curriculum where the problems they face are ones in our control. In that context it's ok to oversimplify if we 1. Tell the student we're oversimplifying, and maintain their trust in us so that they'll follow along when we do so. 2. Revisit oversimplified explanations when they have enough knowledge and context to understand more detailed and correct explanation. The point I've been making is that Javascript makes it easy to pace our explanations of complex programming topics while still allowing students to consistently writing working code. Most languages require a large amounts of either upfront understanding or faith in "magic incantations", both of which hinder learning (this is not a criticism of those languages, they were designed for professionals). So Javascript still manages pretty admirably, all things considered.