On Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 17:03:42 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:
As a note, the 'which language is best for CS 1' debate has long been debated -- but at least in a school setting, I've found the quality/enthusiasm/encouragement of the teacher to be the most important aspect regardless of language choice.
As someone that's been teaching beginners to program at a university for a long time (but not in a CS department) I've come to see the choice of language as largely unimportant. You have to decide what you want to teach them and then eliminate the languages that aren't suitable. D is one of many languages that would work with the right content. Other languages, like C++, add unnecessary overhead and thus should not be used.
It's often said "X is a complicated language" but that's the wrong way to look at it. You're teaching a set of programming concepts, not a language. The question is how well a particular language works for learning those concepts.
