D vs Java as a first programming language

[Jarrett Billingsley]

On Sun, Sep 28, 2008 at 8:03 AM, Nicolas Sicard <dransic at free.fr> wrote:

> I can imagine my first lesson with Java:
>
>    public class HelloWorld {
>        public static void main(String[] args) {
>            System.out.print("Hello world!");
>        }
>    }
>
> I would have to explain what a class is. What a method is. What a public or
> private visibility means. What a static method is. What the dots in
> "System.out.print" mean... :) Then how to compile it. Why you can't run it
> without a virtual machine. A virtual what?

It's funny you mention this because I had this exact experience last
year.  I worked as a student helper at my university, where students
from classes I had already taken could come and ask questions about
things they didn't understand and assignments they were doing.  For
some reason, the simplest introductory programming course at my
university is taught in Java.  And every week, there'd be at _least_
two people asking me why we had to put the "public static void
main(String[] args)", why variables had to be declared before use, why
they had to compile and then run etc.  And these same people had
problems grasping concepts of what a string was and that numbers were
not infinitely precise.  It seems like throwing all this OO junk at
people from the outset is way too much information at one time.