Language complexity may not matter much. "He speculated that the size of programming languages might confuse many students trying to learn to program. Java, th

Language complexity may not matter much. "He speculated that the size of programming languages might confuse many students trying to learn to program. Java, the teacher’s programming language of choice at the end of the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st, is defined loosely but at great length in several hundred pages.4 Natural Deduction, on the other hand, can be defined precisely on a single side of a single A4 sheet, in a normal font size. It is small and conceptually simple: surely it can be taught! Well, up to a point it can, but the results were depressingly familiar. Figure 14 shows the results from an in-course exam on formal logical proof. Unlike the examinations of section 3, students were strongly discouraged from guessing, with negative marks for wrong answers in multiple-choice questions and extensive unseen proof problems. As a consequence, two humps are clearly visible, with one at 33-40 (about 50%) and another at 65-72 (about 85%). (This data was collected long before Dehnadi’s test was developed, so we can’t analyse it further)." Saeed Dehnadi - The camel has two humps (working title): http://mrss.dokoda.jp/r/http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://mrss.dokoda.jp/r/http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/Ph...