On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 06:03:43PM +0000, Lance Bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote: > 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.
I don't know how CS programs are carried out these days, but back when I was in university, the choice of language is largely irrelevant, because the whole point of a programming course isn't to teach you a specific language, but to teach you the *principles* that underlie programming in general. There are really only a small handful of different paradigms that you need to learn; once you learned the principles behind them, they can be applied to any language out there. You wouldn't need anyone to teach you a new language then; you could just learn it yourself by applying these same principles. The rest, as they say, is just details. ;-) T -- The irony is that Bill Gates claims to be making a stable operating system and Linus Torvalds claims to be trying to take over the world. -- Anonymous
