Languages

What's Wrong with Teaching Other Languages

What's Wrong with High Level Languages in General

• Close enough to algebra to be confusing
• Assignment looks like equality
• Equality testing uses a different operator than in algebra
• Implied multiplication doesn't work anymore
• State changes everything
• Key concept that needs to be taught first
• Functions
• Expressions are Hard
• Precedence
• Associativity
• The term binary - has double meaning
• Parenthesis are needed
• Especially confusing when functions are also used
• Balancing is difficult
• Variables
• Concept of scope has to be introduced
• Have to invent variable names
• More choices for the student to make
• Hard to make them descriptive
• End up either too short, or too general
• Risks students using vulgarities or other inappropriateness
• More mental bookkeeping to remember variable usage
• Keyword conflicts
• Certain letters (lower-case L, lower-case Z) look like numbers
• Too many ways to do the same thing
• Do while vs while do
• Syntactic sugar like for and switch
• Functions vs macros
• Mutator arithmetic vs expression arithmetic
• Student has no clear understanding of how to do what they need
• Hard to communicate succinctly
• Encourages terse, yet dense, lines of code
• Very difficult to pronounce out loud
• Semicolons are added noise
• Too many punctuation symbols that are difficult to tell apart

What's Wrong With Compilable Languages

• Have to declare everything
• Lots of redundant information
• Need to introduce compiler
• Errors are typically obtuse and can cascade
• Tend to require lots of extra noise
• (int main) in C, (public static void) in Java

What's Wrong With Scripting Languages

• Highly powerful concepts provide more rope to hang oneself
• Language tries make everything work, making errors harder to spot
• Fancy operations, like distributing functions over lists automatically, are confusing
• Operators often have multiple meanings and can show up in multiple places
• Everything is implicitly polymorphic, which is a very obtuse concept
• Burden of tracking type exists, but for programmer instead of compiler
• Magic symbols and pronouns are just more noise to deal with

What's Wrong With Matlab

• Too many windows
• Redundant operators, scalar vs matrix
• Lines are blurred between data types
• Vectors are also 1-rowed matrices
• Scalars are also 1-columned vectors
• Scalar functions automatically become vector functions, sometimes
• The semicolon for output suppression is very difficult to enforce
• Using 0 for false, and any other for true is flawed
• Interactive sessions are difficult to teach
• Input and output are intermingled in written notes
• Students get the two confused
• Ability to apply operators to entire vectors discourages using loops
• Very easy to have names conflict with keywords, especially when saving files
• Filenames can't use spaces

What's Wrong With Type

• Data is inherently ambiguous no matter what (int can be a height measurement, or an index, or a zip code)
• Concept useful, but difficult to digest for beginners
• Crux of the difficulty: external vs internal representation
• Have to differentiate type checking from execution

The Answer is Rex86!