Yes I believe you are on to something here.
> Good luck with your research, but how are you going to discern the difference between high and low level languages?
Thanks! I'll share my findings on HN when I get them, maybe they'll make it to the front page who knows. My research is focused on what features or design elements exactly made Matlab so much more understandable than C++. I think it comes down to
- single data structure that you can put anything in. The table is a very good general structure. Excel echoes this, as people find excel very approachable.
- single numerical type. Everything is basically a float, so you don't have to think about all the numerical nuance involved in choosing between ints, floats, doubles, longs etc.
- 1 indexing, because that's always such a sticking point to brand new programmers
- interactive IDE that allows you to see all of the variables and click into them to see their values. The Matlab REPL isn't great but it's a huge step up from the write-compile-run loop in C++.
Honestly I'd like to try Lua. It has a lot of these properties, so I think it could maybe have good success. But you're right, I'd like to rerun the experiment with all of the languages you listed.
Yes, I'm aware of Jshell. Jshell is what you get when you take a static strongly typed compiled language and you give it an interactive shell. It's not exactly coherent, and still doesn't solve the most salient issues. Using JShell is better than an IDE IMO, but if we're going that direction then why are we still using Java? There are far better interactive languages out there.
> to me it was a giant oddball
It is an oddball language, because most languages are written by developers for developers to do the things developers do. Matlab was written for scientists to do science, and because scientists are not developers, Matlab is designed in a way that is more friendly to them. Sure, learning Matlab is not going to help you in a job interview at an OOP shop, if only just because the interviewers there have an opinion about Matlab being an oddball language (although I've managed to get an interviewer to call in his colleagues to see my one liner Matlab solution to a whiteboard coding question, "We've certainly never gotten that answer before" they said). But the things that make it odd to professional programmers make it more understandable to children, I have found. 1 indexing is the best example. People here will complain about it endlessly, but children will consider it obvious and won't think twice about indexing an array with 1 as the first element.
Here's the difference.
And then we move on to the next topic or the activity at hand. And then we spend the next amount of time talking about indexing, not doing fun things like the activity at hand. The difference between 1 indexing and 0 indexing is trivial in the grand scheme of things. But it's and example of something where just a slight change is the difference between understanding and confusion.> Also, are you sure matlab is a good language for learning?
I am not sure, that's why I'm doing research on it. But the reason I'm doing research here is because I saw a dramatic result from an experiment, and I want to pull on that thread. The experiment was teaching robotics to middle school students (11-13) using C++ and Matlab. Both groups with little to no computing experience. One was taught C++ in the context of making a robot do a task. The other was taught Matlab. The Matlab group finished the task with ample time to spare, while the C++ had barely gotten past the C++ preliminaries and needed extra time to finish the task. There's got to be something here, it's not like we were trying to make Matlab win. We thought maybe it would have a slight edge but it was just a blowout.