> Otherwise it's doing the students a disservice as they'll never use the language again and will have to relearn a whole new syntax later on.
They will have to to learn many new syntax in their career so that is a good start.
I never understood some people acting as if syntax were a big hurdle. Do people really need more than a few hours to learn a new syntax? From APL to C to Haskell to Lisp, I can't ever remember struggling with the syntax of a language.
> It's also far better to learn in a widely used language because there will be a wide variety of resources that can help you solve simple problems (and this is even more true in the era of ChatGPT).
This can be a pro and a con. While students should learn how to use publicly available information form search engines, stack overflow and so on, it can also be valuable to teach them ways of not having to rely on them. Learning to read proper technical documentation and working you way through a problem without had-holding is a great skill.
That said, shere is an good argument for using a "real-world" languages for teaching though: Studends will be be more motivated to learn them. Getting them interested in a "toy" language is just a hard sell. Motivation is what determines learning success more than having a technically perfect learning path.
Yes, for beginner programmers syntax is a huge deal. Sticking to something consistent as one starts out prevents conflating variations of design (encapsulation, coherence, atomicity) with variations of punctuation.
Well then at what point will they be learning the syntax of another language? They’d be well past the point of beginner by then, no? And even if they’d be in a junior role (assuming junior = beginner), how much does any of this talk actually matter when the job demands that an employee learn a language anyway?
They will have to to learn many new syntax in their career so that is a good start.
I never understood some people acting as if syntax were a big hurdle. Do people really need more than a few hours to learn a new syntax? From APL to C to Haskell to Lisp, I can't ever remember struggling with the syntax of a language.
> It's also far better to learn in a widely used language because there will be a wide variety of resources that can help you solve simple problems (and this is even more true in the era of ChatGPT).
This can be a pro and a con. While students should learn how to use publicly available information form search engines, stack overflow and so on, it can also be valuable to teach them ways of not having to rely on them. Learning to read proper technical documentation and working you way through a problem without had-holding is a great skill.
That said, shere is an good argument for using a "real-world" languages for teaching though: Studends will be be more motivated to learn them. Getting them interested in a "toy" language is just a hard sell. Motivation is what determines learning success more than having a technically perfect learning path.