Comments on: Java considered harmful as first programming language… http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/ Internet Gaming, Computer Games, Technology, MMO, and Web 2.0 Wed, 08 Sep 2010 00:35:34 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: adam http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/comment-page-1/#comment-1492 adam Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:50:19 +0000 http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/#comment-1492 Sure, C# may support fn programming, but it doesn't enforce it. Since you're trying to teach students to think functionally, I feel you need something that does enforce it. I think both Java and C# are good languages to teach *at some point* on a CS course, but just not necessarily the first language. Sure, C# may support fn programming, but it doesn’t enforce it. Since you’re trying to teach students to think functionally, I feel you need something that does enforce it. I think both Java and C# are good languages to teach *at some point* on a CS course, but just not necessarily the first language.

]]> By: Mark Grant http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/comment-page-1/#comment-1489 Mark Grant Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:24:21 +0000 http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/#comment-1489 C# has anonymous functions and higher-order functions - so you can write functional programs in C# (shame Java doesnt). Also if you want a good ide with a functional language try F# (written in Microsoft's Cambridge labs and being turned into an official MS language), which is a .Net functional language and therefore works within Visual Studio. (Which ignoring any anti-MS bile is a pretty good IDE - I haven't used Eclipse in years so I couldn't compare!!!). C# has anonymous functions and higher-order functions – so you can write functional programs in C# (shame Java doesnt). Also if you want a good ide with a functional language try F# (written in Microsoft’s Cambridge labs and being turned into an official MS language), which is a .Net functional language and therefore works within Visual Studio. (Which ignoring any anti-MS bile is a pretty good IDE – I haven’t used Eclipse in years so I couldn’t compare!!!).

]]> By: Darius K. http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/comment-page-1/#comment-1470 Darius K. Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:00:07 +0000 http://tmachine1.dh.bytemark.co.uk/blog/index.php/2008/02/13/java-considered-harmful-as-first-programming-language/#comment-1470 My first *formal* education in programming (not including messing around in BASIC on my TRS-80) was in C, but it was a year-long high school course in C where we pretty much learned the higher concepts of what you might learn in a course on Assembly language. We spent five months on "bit flipping," which was just pointing to memory locations and running ROTs and masks and stuff on them, writing your own putpixel with double buffering, that sort of thing. Then I took a C++ class, in which I learned almost nothing. Then I took electrical engineering courses and learned to program entirely in Assembly on the X86, 680x, 68000k, ARM, PIC, and a few others that escape me right now. At which point I realized I didn't care about programming that much and wanted to be a hardware engineer. And then somehow I ended up working on video games. But I'm still not a programmer! ...was I going somewhere with this? I forget. Oh yeah. The point is, I agree with the bottom-up approach to programming. Learn the basics, start with an incredibly simple (by modern standards) processor, learn ASM or something just-barely-above-ASM for that processor. Although this could just be my bias. One of the things that always held me back as a programmer was my complete inability to understand classes, virtual functions, templates, and all that other stuff that I know just enough about to know I don't understand. Granted, I never really put my mind to it because I resigned myself to hardware by the time I was being taught that stuff. But still. I was always good at the low-level machine code and the high-level state machine / turing machine / graph theory / complete grammar / CS-type-stuff. Yet I never managed to fill in the middle. My first *formal* education in programming (not including messing around in BASIC on my TRS-80) was in C, but it was a year-long high school course in C where we pretty much learned the higher concepts of what you might learn in a course on Assembly language. We spent five months on “bit flipping,” which was just pointing to memory locations and running ROTs and masks and stuff on them, writing your own putpixel with double buffering, that sort of thing.

Then I took a C++ class, in which I learned almost nothing.

Then I took electrical engineering courses and learned to program entirely in Assembly on the X86, 680x, 68000k, ARM, PIC, and a few others that escape me right now. At which point I realized I didn’t care about programming that much and wanted to be a hardware engineer.

And then somehow I ended up working on video games. But I’m still not a programmer!

…was I going somewhere with this? I forget.

Oh yeah. The point is, I agree with the bottom-up approach to programming. Learn the basics, start with an incredibly simple (by modern standards) processor, learn ASM or something just-barely-above-ASM for that processor.

Although this could just be my bias. One of the things that always held me back as a programmer was my complete inability to understand classes, virtual functions, templates, and all that other stuff that I know just enough about to know I don’t understand. Granted, I never really put my mind to it because I resigned myself to hardware by the time I was being taught that stuff.

But still. I was always good at the low-level machine code and the high-level state machine / turing machine / graph theory / complete grammar / CS-type-stuff. Yet I never managed to fill in the middle.

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