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Do note that the author is not a Professor teaching CS. If you click through the link in the first sentence of the post, this is the question he was trying to a
by gcommer 12y ago
Do note that the author is not a Professor teaching CS. If you click through the link in the first sentence of the post, this is the question he was trying to answer:
"What's a good first programming language to teach my [son / daughter / other-person-with-no-programming-experience]?"
His post wasn't really about teaching CS to students who are paying for years of classes. For his target audience, motivating them and giving them tools to quickly build usable software is important. Being able to trivially share said software is another plus.
- Jweb_Guru 12y agoEverything the GP said above is correct, though. Since so many people's first exposure to programming is through one of these languages, many people are simply unaware that it's possible to do better. Many people find it hard to switch from their first language. I agree with you that Haskell, Rust, and (to a much lesser extent) Lisp have the problem that it's hard to get started with easy graphical libraries aimed at beginners, though I don't agree that that's the case for Python. This is why historically there were languages like Logo explicitly designed as "Lisp for beginners," but today most such attempts seem to simplify programming to the point that it can hardly be described as programming at all (thinking of tools like Scratch).