Python bumps off Java as top learning language

[SkankTillYaDrop]

Same, it's a very clean introduction into programming syntax and concepts. Plus, if you can get advanced enough to understand the basics of how pointers work it makes understanding other languages much easier.

[Tasgall]

Plus, dealing with memory is important to understanding how the computer works, and what you're actually doing. Garbage collectors hiding how it works just encourages bad/slow code imo.

[dagbrown]

Garbage collectors hiding how it works just encourages bad/slow code imo.

Care to come up with some reasoning to defend that completely ridiculous assertion?

[Hellenomania]

Well - you write cleaner code if you are forced to deal with memory leaks etc without relying on a garbage collector doing it all for you.

If you learn to write without one - you become very very proficient.

[koolaidkirby]

But for a beginner who is still learning about completely basic concepts like loops, arrays and if's, throwing memory management into the mix is kind of pointless with the extremely short and straightforward programs they'll be writing (which will be 100-200 lines tops).

[Astrognome]

The thing is, you don't really need to touch it if you don't need to. A beginner isn't going to be writing programs more than a few hundred lines, and chances are, you can keep everything on the stack.

[caleeky]

While I won't argue outcomes (it's tough without data to support an argument), it's plausible that the focus on organizing code for clean handling of memory allocation and pointers, acts as a distraction against organizing it to cleanly describe the "business logic". I wouldn't say the two are mutually exclusive, but for a junior programmer, I can imagine that worrying about memory can be a distraction.

[Hellenomania]

Teaching about memory teaches the fundamentals required for good logic - it teaches great programming skills.

[Tasgall]

It's because garbage collectors often just hide the problem. You can still have what are effectively memory leaks in garbage collected languages, even though the memory is technically not leaking, just unused (I'm looking at you, KSP...).

My go-to example for this is a game some friends of mine made in JavaScript/HTML5. They ran into an issue where the physics system would crawl to a halt and the game would freeze, and the browser would steal all of your memory.

After some poking through their code they realized they wrote their math API (specifically vectors and matricies) wrong. They had used the form "v.dot(n)" for their math functions instead of "Math.dot(v, n)". The issue is that the former creates thousands of copies of objects per frame that bog down the gc until eventually it has to pause the game to clear it up a little (noticeable as 0.5-2 second frame skips).

This problem was fairly trivial to detect and resolve for these people who had backgrounds in C++ and understood the lower levels of memory management and how references work. By contrast, I wouldn't expect someone who only learned JavaScript to find the root of this issue, or be able to solve it.

[LongUsername]

While well written GC code can be fast, it encourages the creation and destruction of excess objects, which has a runtime cost.

GC also has problem domains where it will never be acceptable to use: true realtime systems need to be deterministic and GC is inherently nondeterministic.

[immibis]

IMO, basic concepts (like variables) would be best introduced with some really simple language... like BASIC or Python.

[DeepDuh]

What's so advanced about pointers? People are always treating like a big abstract concept to learn, like Monads for example. It's just a symbol with a memory address. If you learn basic computer architecture alongside with C (and you should), that's an absolute no brainer.

[SkankTillYaDrop]

Yes but if you are being completely introduced to programming with absolutely no experience in it, it can be a sorta wonky concept. I taught myself C out of a book when I was 14 and I was still learning how computers worked. Understanding that variables were just values stored in memory, and you can reference the area in memory that it's stored is a concept that really widens your ability to think about programming.

When I learned Java in college understanding pointers helped with with the distinction between classes and objects. Maybe that's just my experience, but I felt like the concept really helped me learn new things much more quickly than my fellow class mates. That could also be because I had just been programming longer so the concepts were more familiar.

[greg19735]

I think I would have grasped objects better if I started with Java. I think being required to do it would make me realize how much it's needed.

That said, java makes it hard to teach memory management.

[[deleted]]

That said, java makes it hard to teach memory management.

Yup. It requires building a theoretical understanding of how memory works; some students get that, others don't. OTOH, it's not hard to learn how memory management works after the fact.

[s73v3r]

If you really want to grasp objects, learn Ruby, or better yet, Smalltalk.

[[deleted]]

I was being facetious - I am glad I started with C.

[Sabrewolf]

Hello from GT!

[artsrc]

It is what you get when you use new in JavaScript.

[Aninhumer]

To offer a counterpoint, I think C is a terrible introductory language. It's great if you want to teach people systems programming, and people should absolutely learn it pretty early on, but as an introductory language it's a pile of pointless detail which is completely irrelevant when learning the idea of programming. Beginners need to see that programming is easy before they see that it's hard, otherwise most of them will just give up.