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This is the wrong kind of approachable, because you have to learn a ton of random web things before you do anything outside the repl and before your program can
by turminal 5y ago
This is the wrong kind of approachable, because you have to learn a ton of random web things before you do anything outside the repl and before your program can even process user input and then people struggle with those two concepts that would be trivial to them if they could be introduced earlier.
Having seen what having javascript as a first language does to first year students I can't understand why this is considered a good idea.
- mwcampbell 5y agoI'm an uncle of 6 children, ages 7 and under. My guess is that if any of them have ever seen a VT100 terminal emulator or Windows console window, it was probably only when watching me or my brother-in-law. So traditional line-oriented programs, with plain text input and output, will be alien to kids of this generation. I know Racket has an integrated GUI toolkit, but will this new generation be able to run it on their tablets? One benefit of the great variety in front-end JavaScript frameworks, often criticized as churn, is that we're more likely to arrive at an abstraction that will be approachable to beginners. I look forward to watching how this generation learns to program.
- mftb 5y agoBringing the best education materials to the most widely used environment, and language doesn't seem very difficult to understand. Nothing prohibits them from learning, "better" languages after you reach them, but first you have to reach them.