Is D programming friendly for beginners?

[H. S. Teoh]

On Tue, Mar 12, 2024 at 06:03:43PM +0000, Lance Bachmeier via Digitalmars-d-announce wrote:
> On Tuesday, 12 March 2024 at 17:03:42 UTC, Mike Shah wrote:
> 
> > As a note, the 'which language is best for CS 1' debate has long
> > been debated -- but at least in a school setting, I've found the
> > quality/enthusiasm/encouragement of the teacher to be the most
> > important aspect regardless of language choice.
> 
> As someone that's been teaching beginners to program at a university
> for a long time (but not in a CS department) I've come to see the
> choice of language as largely unimportant. You have to decide what you
> want to teach them and then eliminate the languages that aren't
> suitable. D is one of many languages that would work with the right
> content. Other languages, like C++, add unnecessary overhead and thus
> should not be used.
> 
> It's often said "X is a complicated language" but that's the wrong way
> to look at it. You're teaching a set of programming concepts, not a
> language.  The question is how well a particular language works for
> learning those concepts.

I don't know how CS programs are carried out these days, but back when I
was in university, the choice of language is largely irrelevant, because
the whole point of a programming course isn't to teach you a specific
language, but to teach you the *principles* that underlie programming in
general. There are really only a small handful of different paradigms
that you need to learn; once you learned the principles behind them,
they can be applied to any language out there.  You wouldn't need anyone
to teach you a new language then; you could just learn it yourself by
applying these same principles.

The rest, as they say, is just details. ;-)


T

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