D vs Java as a first programming language

[bearophile]

Nicolas Sicard:
> They are college students. They are biologists and most of them won't 
> need programming skills after they graduate.

Then D is probably a bit too much complex for them. They can surely learn it, but probably there are better languages for them.

But remember that students aren't all the same. Each one has a different mindset/brain, so probably for some of them Scheme is better, for some other C/Pascal/D are maybe fitter, and so on. There are many kinds of languages not just because problems are different, but also because the brain of the programmers is different, and such differences are often present in student brains already :-)


> I really don't think D is necessarily more complex (though it surely can 
> be). Pascal was as close to the CPU than D, and about as safe, wasn't 
> it?

I think modern ObjectPascals, like FreePascal, are a little safer than D still, but the difference isn't much, I think. Java is safer than both.


> and the stability.

The stability isn't much of a problem, I think.


> I think Python is the right alternative: large audience and docs, easy 
> for beginners, libs designed for biological science are available... I 
> just need to start learning it myself ;-)

For them Python is probably one of the the best things, then. There are lot of people that use Python for biology, me too. But note that I also use D for bioinformatics, mostly because sometimes Python is too much slow. But your students have to learn programming first, so performance is not important.


> I just need to start learning it myself ;-)

Few months may suffice. You need a good large book on it. There's the newsgroup too, where you can ask things.

Bye,
bearophile