Re:What's Great about Julia?
by grahamas on Thursday December 08, 2022 @12:50PM
(#33910832)
> I don't understand why we don't just teach JS or TS as a starting language.
IMO the main problem is pedagogical. JS is a vast sea of conveniences that contradict conventional programming practices. This is also the reason I hesitate to recommend R as a starting language, for all that it's the de facto language of statistical analysis. Both languages are hard to teach in a coherent way, because both have lots of gotchas and exceptions that aren't bad, per se, but in the aggregate impede understanding of fundamentals.
Just yesterday I was working with someone on fundamentals in R, distinguishing between literals, variables, and functions. He got the idea, and then we got to model specification (`lm(y ~ x)`) and I had to shrug and say, those "identifiers" are different. I shudder to think of trying to teach types with a beginning student in JS.
IMO the main problem is pedagogical. JS is a vast sea of conveniences that contradict conventional programming practices. This is also the reason I hesitate to recommend R as a starting language, for all that it's the de facto language of statistical analysis. Both languages are hard to teach in a coherent way, because both have lots of gotchas and exceptions that aren't bad, per se, but in the aggregate impede understanding of fundamentals.
Just yesterday I was working with someone on fundamentals in R, distinguishing between literals, variables, and functions. He got the idea, and then we got to model specification (`lm(y ~ x)`) and I had to shrug and say, those "identifiers" are different. I shudder to think of trying to teach types with a beginning student in JS.