Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Recommended Resources 1st programming languages

I am so old that I have always liked the parsimony of good old fashioned C. My K&R still sits up there on my office book shelves and even though I never use it anymore I am loath the throw it out. I think that C allows learning of the fundamentals very well without a whole lot of syntax to worry about.

As was highlighted by an informal study by Philip Guo, lots of schools now teach Python, particularly for early introductory courses. I have mixed feelings about this choice. Python is a wonderfully friendly language, but that friendliness is bundled together with some problems.

This was made apparent to me in part by my experience with students who chose to code in their interviews in Python. In many ways, Python is the ideal interview language, since its concise and readable syntax makes the constraints of coding on the whiteboard more bearable. But what I saw was that students who learn Python often walk away with a rather rough model of the semantics of the language. You might be surprised at what fraction of students who have programmed extensively in Python can't guess how Python lists might be implemented, to say nothing of their ability to explain the semantics of language features like generators or decorators.

This isn't really a knock on Python. After all, there's something great about a tool that lets you get things done without fully understanding how it works. But in different ways, both Scheme and C encourage you to understand what's going on from the ground up, and there's a certain pedagogical power in that. All in, I think Python is a great choice for an early introductory course, particularly one meant for those who aren't going to end up as computer scientists or full-time programmers. But I'd be leery of using it outside of those circumstances.

A development that I'm personally rather encouraged by is the emergence of statically typed functional languages, ML in particular, as teaching tools. Over the last few years, I've had the pleasure of visiting and lecturing at a number of schools that teach using OCaml or SML, including Brown, Cornell, Penn, Princeton, CMU and Harvard.

ML has gained ground for good reasons. First, it shares much of Scheme's elegant intellectual foundations, even though its core isn't quite as charmingly minimalistic as Scheme's. But ML has a wider range than Scheme because it allows you to show students the role of types in programming. Despite that greater range, OCaml and SML are relatively simple languages, which matters even more for teaching than it does for everyday use.

The only choice I've seen a lot of that I can't reconcile myself to is Java.