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?
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?
No way it’s C. The average student will go home and find that they can’t do much of anything they like, with the level of C they know. Even printing a string is famously hard in C, they’ll hate it.
The average students wants to build games, websites, discord bots etc. Javascript makes it easy, none are easy in C.
printf(“hello world!”);If this is famously difficult to you, I don’t think computer science is your bag.
That is not a valid C program.
print(‘hello world’)
Is a valid python program.
Oh no, you’re right, strings are famously difficult to print in C.
hint: main.
🙄
Yeah it’s not for the students! OP even specifically said they aren’t CS students.
Now start doing concatenation, splitting, replacements, char/string/integer conversions, something as simple as returning a string from a function etc. Students will start banging their heads against a wall, a wall that can only be overcome by studying the intricacies of memory management, pointers and char encodings. They will not be producing results for a very long time.
I have no reason to believe this is remotely interesting to non-CS students. Even for CS students, most opt to work in higher abstraction levels given the option.
I’m glad someone is saying it. I’m a software engineer and someone elsewhere in this thread is giving me shit for not having much use for the low level stuff.
I was teaching a junior about character encoding a couple of months ago (I suspect his CS degree came free in a box of cereal) but most of what we do is build tooling on top of other tooling. I’m not working on bare metal here!