Re:Go is not an easy language
by joshspankit on Monday February 22, 2021 @01:06PM
(#26227893)
> Back to languages. If you've never taught an introduction to computer programming for a general audience you are blind to what does and does not matter about a language. You look at things like `foo.bar()` and think "Yeah that's a simple method invocation" and have no idea how many people you just lost.
I keenly remember in college when they were first starting to teach me C++ and I asked something like “Ok: I hear what you’re saying that this is a function, and that’s a parameter, but my question is how does the computer know that you’ve named it [whatever the variable name was]?
The teacher had no understanding that this was a conceptual barrier.
Of course now I know that the answer is “because order of the syntax tells it so“, but stuff like that made those classes much harder than they needed to be.
I keenly remember in college when they were first starting to teach me C++ and I asked something like “Ok: I hear what you’re saying that this is a function, and that’s a parameter, but my question is how does the computer know that you’ve named it [whatever the variable name was]?
The teacher had no understanding that this was a conceptual barrier.
Of course now I know that the answer is “because order of the syntax tells it so“, but stuff like that made those classes much harder than they needed to be.