How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go

Re:How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go by mjn on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @10:40PM (#5366463)

My intro programming course (in high school) was in C++, and I think it would've scared me off programming entirely if I hadn't picked up mIRC-script (a very different language) on my own as a hobby. There is so much accidental complexity in C++ that it's a pretty terrible introductory language. We literally spent several weeks of the semester on how to get input and output to work properly through the giant mess that is iostreams.

At the introductory level, I think the biggest issue is teaching "computational thinking" [1] or "procedural literacy" [2]: getting people thinking about the idea that you're writing specifications for a machine to carry out computations. From that perspective, it's best to pick a language that lets you get to algorithmic logic as quickly as possible.

[1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/wing/www/publications/Wing0...

[2] http://dm.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/publications/MateasOTH2005....

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Re:How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go by chadcf on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @11:25PM (#5366612)

Me too (well, ok, my first programming class was in Fortran taught by a 85 year old man who spent most of the time telling us about how much harder it was back when you had to use fortran).

I hated C++. I still think it's a fairly terrible language. But, for fun I took the Harvard CS50 course to refresh my knowledge of C and I found that WAY better than my C++ course. I think C is brilliant for introducing programming because it's very very simple, yet also very very difficult. There's not much to learn, except a lot of concepts (memory usage, data structures, etc).

I also think Objective-C is a really great language though, so I might be crazy. But, you give me a choice between C++ and a language that is basically C with a few additional keywords and garbage collection, and I find that an easy choice...

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Re:How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go by kyllo on Tuesday March 12, 2013 @11:43PM (#5366684)

C++ is terrifying, and teaching an introductory programming course in C++ is an awful idea. Using plain C would make much more sense. C is also a better choice than Java because Java doesn't force you to learn about pointers, or memory in general, really. Countless Java bugs are introduced by programmers who don't understand what operations give you a copy of something, and which ones give you a reference to something (especially if that something is mutable).

I also think Objective-C is pretty good though, especially with the addition of ARC. It's like a better C, with Smalltalk-style objects and a lot more (mutable and immutable) datatype options. Much saner and less painful than C++, but more challenging than Java.

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Re:How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go by argv_empty on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @10:29AM (#5368594)

Java doesn't force you to learn about pointers, or memory in general, really.

Countless Java bugs are introduced by programmers who don't understand what operations give you a copy of something, and which ones give you a reference to something

These two statements seem to be at odds with each other.

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Re:How We Went from 30 Servers to 2: Go by LinaLauneBaer on Wednesday March 13, 2013 @04:52AM (#5367472)

The Objective-C garbage collection is deprecated.

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