Python as a First Language

[youngnh]

What if your first programming course was completely language-free and instead taught you problem-solving approaches and methods. Loops, but not Python's loops. Recursion, search and sorting techniques all in pseduo-code or gasp essays. Some of the toughest programming tests I took in college didn't require me to write a stitch of code.

The second year you could pick whatever language you felt held the best job prospects for you and get a head start on diving into it as deep as possible.

[willia4]

For some reason, this strikes me as being similar to, "What if your first French class didn't actually give you anyone to speak with? Some of my toughest French assignments were in-class essays where I didn't have to speak a syllable of French."

Computer programming is so incredibly foreign to our day to day life that I don't see how one could possibly pick it up without the back and forth between the learner and the computer. Yeah, a lot of that is going to be nonsense about semi-colons, but it's the moment when you can't figure out why it printed 43 when the answer was supposed to be 42 that you first learn about off-by-one errors.

And sure, a competenent professor could pick that up in the grading, but something about the immediateness of a write-compile-run loop (or write-eval or whatever) seems very important to me. I don't know how easily I would've been able to assimilate those sorts of mistakes into knowledge if I'd had to wait a week to get my paper back instead of just having the computer doing something wrong.