D in the ix magazine about "programming today"

[Don]

dsimcha wrote:
> == Quote from retard (re at tard.com.invalid)'s article
>> Quite many young Haskell experts started with Haskell when they were 9-12
>> years old. Having english as your native language and academically
>> educated parents has a tremendous effect on e.g. vocabularity at that
>> age. Some slumdog might only know ~3000 words at that age, child of a
>> highly educated family perhaps 25.000 words.
>> I'm not saying that everyone should learn Haskell, but I know it's
>> possible to learn stuff like Curry-Howard isomorphism, hylomorphisms,
>> monads, monad transformers, comonads, and analysing amortized costs of
>> algorithms at that age. It's just dumb to assume that young people can't
>> learn something as complex as static types!
>> I remember when I was that young, I used to play with QBasic. I knew very
>> well why 'DEFINT A-Z' made all programs faster and knew what IEEE
>> floating point looked like on bit level (well, at least mostly). I knew
>> how to do blits in graphics programming since I already had done them in
>> assembly on C-64. Had there been Haskell and all the modern tools
>> available like today there is, I would have probably spent more time on
>> them.
> 
> Yes, but you were probably exceptionally talented and/or motivated.  From
> experiences I have had getting friends through programming 101, I believe that,
> when people teach programming, they tend to take for granted some very basic
> concepts such as variable assignment, flow control and nesting.  The first
> programming language should be one that strikes a balance between allowing the
> teaching of these basic concepts on the one hand and not being a completely
> useless toy language on the other.
> 
> IMHO even Python's strong but dynamic typing is too complex for someone who has
> literally never programmed before.  I think weak typing a la PHP or Visual Basic,
> so that the student doesn't even have to think about types until he/she
> understands variable assignment and flow control and has actually experienced the
> feeling of writing simple but useful programs, is the best way to start off.  Good
> programming practices are useless if you end up totally lost on the variables and
> flow control level.  Furthermore, I don't think good practices and well structured
> code can truly be appreciated until you've done it wrong first.  Lastly, to most
> absolute beginners automatic conversion, e.g. from strings to numbers, probably
> seems like the least surprising behavior, since that is how it works in Excel, etc.

Both Pascal and the original BASIC were strongly typed, and widely used 
for beginners.