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We should rethink how we teach people to code (deadsimpletech.com)

submitted 4 weeks ago by BlueMonday1984@awful.systems to c/notawfultech@awful.systems

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Another excellent piece from Iris Meredith - strongly recommend reading if you want an idea of how to un-fuck software as a field.

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[–] smiletolerantly@awful.systems 3 points 4 weeks ago

Gotcha. It's still a fun question to think about though.

My uni switched from teaching their intro classes in Java to python the year before I started, and in defense of python, I have to say: it's so simple for small things, that it gets out of the way in the classroom. Sure, it's not great for big projects, but it is very easy to demonstrate concepts in a readable manner.

(That was the second program I enrolled in, btw. The first one, at another uni, they started with Haskell. No joke. And while I do appreciate Haskell and functional languages in general now, maybe in part due to this, it just got in the way of the concepts they were actually trying to teach.)

But in any case: uni isn't really there to teach you to code. That's something you are supposed to pick up on along the way, or on the job.