Hello,
I am thinking about teaching my students JavaScript first so that they can start creating websites and make their career, what are your thoughts?
Maybe a middle ground like Go.
So, of the two JavaScript, because motivating them to program is more important than anything else if they have no prior knowledge. javascript has great tooling and faaar less hurdles to get something going then C. Personally i’d go with TypeScript if it has to be anything in this family of languages, because making them think of types early on is helpful when moving to anything more than little web apps. If any other languages are considered, i’d go with python with type hints because it forces you to format your code somewhat readably (believe me, i know that it’s possible to write unreadable python code) but is really low on boilerplate, has great tooling (at least third-party, use uv) as well as stellar IDE support and allows for multiple different paradigms to be explored.
C takes the cake
The answer is Python
bashLet them learn what they’re interested in so long as it passes muster as capable of sufficiently handling the concepts you wish to convey. Some will want low level, some will want an app, some will want to make games. The cross pollination of concepts will demonstrate that while languages may have individual benefits they should not stop at one.
I’ve studied with (now) engineers and there is large portion of people having a hard time with even the concept of a function. We learned C(++) at the time. I guess being forced to learn about what the hardware does kinda messed with people being able to just think about algorithms. As a first programmig language to just write some basic functions I like Python, but to be honest I don’t understand what’s going really going on behind the scenes either. But C is a really solid choice, as what’s really happening is easy to reason about (at least unoptimized) and every other language will have to abstract these same concepts.
If you’re wanting to teach programming concepts, I would start with scratch instead. This can be taught to little kids or older students. It’s what the free comp science class from Harvard starts with
TypeScript > JavaScript all day
Why not SmallBasic then? You could even point them to old computer magazines and see which codes they can get running without much workaround.
C teaches a whole variety of low level concepts that are helpful in any comp sci field. That’s my vote. Python holds your hand too much and JS would require more to get started. If they aren’t shooting for a comp sci degree and are just looking for helpful scripts then python would be fine.
What grade sudents is this for? Do you intend for this to be a dedicated class/semester or just a single unit? How good are they at operating a computer? (Typing, clicking, etc)
These are the questions that need answers before any meaningful advice can be given.
I mean, they’ll probably learn more from C. But please. You can do better than javascript. At least teach them python or something.
JS is actually pretty great as a language these days.
It doesn’t have to imply NPM hell. And it’s got normal syntax and doesn’t do Python’s weird meaningful-indentation thing.
(It does have the == typecasting weirdness though.)
– Frost
I would teach Typescript. Being able to write the types down and hover things to see what types they are will definitely help them.
I think C would put them off. I also wouldn’t go with Python, in case they want to do things like write games or make websites, which are common tasks you can do with Typescript but not very well with Python.
Python has PyGame. For webdev it has some libraries but those do not really teach any basics.
Python’s performance is too poor to do anything serious. Go and look at the screenshots from Pygame. They look like ZX Spectrum era games.
Compare that to something like PixiJS.
If you also plan on teaching html and css, than I’d go for js first. Having your code instantly response in a visual way, is super motivating for most students.
If you just want to tech programming concepts, i’d go for python.
If you want this to be the start of a complete cs study, than you can start with CThat makes sense, I am also teaching html amd css first so I think JavaScript makes sense to teach next.
I was thinking about C because that’s the first thing I learned in the college and that’s my favorite language till this day.
The problem with C as a language for learning is that the error messages are not very specific or descriptive and often you need extra context to understand what is happening. Messing up memory management can result in inconsistent gremlin-like behavior from your programs, it can get very tricky. I had a pretty difficult time when I got to classes that taught C compared to other languages, but the main thing was just that I needed someone to look over my work and explain things to me because unlike with other languages, the self-service ways of figuring it out were much more difficult and it’s easier to get stuck with no idea what to look into next. I ended up begging people online for help with understanding what was going wrong with my programs to supplement the limited amount of time the professor and TAs were available, really grateful to those guys as I probably would have failed it otherwise.
Anyway I would just say that if you do really want to go with C, I think you should be willing to put in more time to explain things to students one on one because many of them may need it.
If you teach them C, they will then be able to digest JS in an afternoon…
Good call. At this point the jankyness of js doesn’t pose a problem and the ones that get enticed will learn about type safety, classes etc down the line.
