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An After-School Program Teaches Teens Java and Python
(spectrum.ieee.org)
The world can be so cruel.
Back when I was in school, corporal punishment was the norm. I would still prefer that over Java.
We get it, you have no idea what modern Java looks like
I know exactly what modern Java looks like, and it could be beautiful. But… legacy cruft and lazy devs make it painful. And tech debt, let’s be honest.
I’d view a greenfield project rather differently, but those are unicorns.
I’d view a greenfield project rather differently, but those are ~~unicorns~~ written in Kotlin.
I don't know a single language that's immune to the things you just mentioned.
Haskell is still as beautiful as the day it was first made.
Except for class methods. We don't talk about methods.
I get it, you have no idea what trying to optimize around an ever-changing JIT recompiler looks like
It looks like something that doesn't happen
Java... I started with Java myself when I was a teen. It's not a good idea.
I think Java is still a good language for beginners. The tooling around it is really good and it catches lots of issues at compile time.
I'd recommend Python or JavaScript to beginners. Also, Java is dying out right now.
I seriously don't get why Python is so popular for learners. Its a weird ass very isolated language syntactically. The libraries for it are great but still.
Because it dared to change the shitty syntax of bad syntax languages so humans can actually read it.
Its probably bias to what you are used to the most. I think for example copy pasting stuff around in C like languages is way easier than the tab mangling one has to perform in python.
Also python has so plenty of bizarre (i.m.o. not very readable) syntax beyond that. Like
def __init__(self) : for a constructor
the most verbose lambda syntax for something that should make it less verbose to inline functions
def x = lambda x: x + 1
logical operators being words while numerical and comparative ones aren't
def x = not a or (b <= c)
private methods not really existing thus needing underscores as a crutch
I don't wanna hate on python, the ecosystem and libraries around it are amazing but people saying python is the gold standard in terms of syntax and "readability" is questionable i.m.o.. There also is a reason why many of new modern hyped languages (which don't have to abide to backwards compatibility to some other language like mojo) like Rust, Kotlin, Go, Zig, and Swift are C style langs.
JavaScript sometimes can be weird as hell. That's why I prefer Python. I don't know, for me it seemed logical from the beginning. Java definitely ain't better.
Java is absolutely not dying... unfortunately. Billions of people depend on spaghetti code written by corporations every day. I think Java will be the next COBOL. It won't die and it's unfortunate.
"Java is dying" is what people who've never actually worked as a dev for a big company think.
The company I work at is currently replacing all of their legacy Java shit with Go
Okay, and this is relevant how? One company doing stupid shit doesn't mean a language is dying - it's the basis of enterprise basically everywhere
Many companies are migrating away from Java. Have you seen any big projects started in the last 5 years that use Java? I haven’t. Java is only used to either maintain existing stuff or to migrate away from even older shit like COBOL or Perl.
Many companies are migrating away from Java.
And way more aren't. Especially among big market cap companies.
Yeah, I have seen plenty of big projects started in Java. Hell, I've written code for at least 10 of them. Just because you personally don't see something happening, doesn't mean it isn't there. Java is as popular as it gets, being in the top 3 languages used. It's not going away and it is not being deprecated any time in the future.
You say legacy code?
Ditto. Been a Java developer for over 10 years and the tool maturity more than makes up for its faults as a language.
In my opinion, C# would be better for this job. It is similar, but has many features that simplify the code, such as top level statements, LINQ, collection expressions and stuff like that. It's also way more popular in game development and that's what most teens are interested in
Java is a great language. Still one of the most used languages in the world. Ditto python
Why after school? I was able to take programming classes in highschool in 2010. In the us
2002, but it was Visual Basic. I got a fucking C in that class because I spent more time helping other kids figure out the assignment than spending time putting worthless clutter in my interfaces to the teachers standards.
Oh well. At least I learned how to write a GUI to track the hackers IP address.
Kids in Asia are way ahead of that. Some countries have had programming on their curriculum for more than a decade
I had programming (Pascal) in school in a random-ass country in Europe 20 years ago (I was like 14).
This has been widespread all over the world for a long time.
At 14 I could barely get a for loop and if statement working properly. Pascal then VB for me, once a week for 2 years. Only really started programming in uni. Some Asian countries start in primary school at as early as 3 years old. It's as important as languages to them. By 14 they're already doing robotics and writing social media clones.
We are quite far behind in the west.
Java is a good language if you're a beginner, but if you've already coded before in other languages, it's going to suck.
Especially for beginners its a bad language. You have the understand artificial concepts about classes, objects, abstract states before you re able to learn the important stuff like if/else, looping etc pp.
I would always give beginners a language which is at least in their way as possible.
You don't really have to.
You can just handwave public static void main, and only deal with primitives, then static functions, before introducing objects.
That's what they did at my high school. It's weird, and there's much better ways and languages to introduce procedural programming, but it's possible.
They should've just picked Kotlin.
It also encourages good basic habits, such as not making a variable mutable unless you specifically need to (val is way more common than var, the IDE makes them very visually distinct).
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2023
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