Survey of Introductory Programming Language

[annie_clem]

Hello Everyone,

I am conducting a research on Go language (Google's new language) to see if it can be used for teaching.

If you have gone through an introductory programming course, please could you spare few minutes to fill in a short questionnaire below (just questions about your programming experience, no personal data ), the data will be used solely for the research work.

http://fluidsurveys.com/surveys/okonud/introdcutory-programming-survey-questionnaire/

Thanks and Best Regards,

[AtomicMaster]

I would say that any compiled language is a bit too much for an intro to programming course, so it really depends on what you are up against. If it's Java and C/C++, then Go is a much better language. If it's basic, PHP or JavaScript or something , then i would say that there are better languages for teaching out there. For example Python, which was written to teach people to program, or Ruby if you want to introduce students to a truly modern language. Go of course is not a bad language, like a cleaned up version of C++, but not necessarily the best choice for an intro to programming class...

 

Just my $.02

[AtomicMaster]

Yes interpreted languages are easier to understand and linguistically differ (in a good way) from a C-like language to be more understandable by people.

[EdEarl]

Yes interpreted languages are easier to understand and linguistically differ (in a good way) from a C-like language to be more understandable by people.

Generally that is true, but there are interpreters of machine code, usually called emulators, that interpret binary instructions that are not easy to read, and their assembly language might be more difficult than C as well.

[AtomicMaster]

Edge cases, just like dynamic architectures in vms used in malware to make it really difficult to reverse or detect, just because it's interpreted assembly for a wonky architecture, doesn't mean that its a good introductory language to learn.

 

A popular interpreted language (with some exceptions, like Perl, most functional languages, Lisp family) is generally much easier to learn than a popular compiled C-like language (Go, C, C++, Java, C#, Objective C)