Many of us took programming 101 in Java and so typed this dozens of times without having a clue what it meant.

tankenmate a day ago | parent | next [-]

I learnt C at Uni (after having taught myself BASIC, Z80 machine code (not assembly), and x86 assembly), when we were taught C it was explained to us what all that sort of thing meant. But having said that most of the class failed to understand.

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mrkeen a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Now we can type out the same semantics, and remain clueless about what it means, but with a new obfuscated syntax which stops us from asking about the semantics.

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derefr a day ago | parent [-]

Still for the better, because each token you don’t have to type when first learning programming is a token you can’t mistype.

(Though the ultimate conclusion of this line of thinking is that programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible, giving the learner as few opportunities to screw up the input as possible. I’m a fan of teaching programming in Ruby, personally. Not theory of programming, mind you; just programming as an iterative human process.)

	▲	Frieren a day ago \| parent [-]
		> programming 101 courses should be taught in as concise and syntax-light a language as possible 100% this. To make Java be the all-language makes it a mess without a defined goal. It is better to start learning with a language better suited for it. And then the learner can specialize and expand to other languages. This also helps to create awareness that different languages have different use cases.