My gut says any new student should start with an interpreted language like Python or JS/TypeScript. As that gets you to running code, and core concepts like variables, loops and if statements in little to no time.
However, there is value in learning some of the under the hood concepts such as pointers, structs, memory layout, endianess, pass by reference, compilers etc.
I don't think schools need to teach employable C/C++ skills, but C/C++ is a great language to play with and experience these core concepts.
However I'm not sure if the value in learning these concepts are real, or it's just my own interests/nostalgia. You can have a successful career in this industry without having to manage a single byte of memory, and it arguably makes sense to accept abstractions at their face value so you can focus on what builds your skills/product.
> pointers, structs, memory layout, endianess, pass by reference, compilers etc.
C++ is a bad language to teach any of these concepts. Sure, people will be exposed to the concepts, but they are presented in a rather esoteric fashion. Not to mention, actually leveraging those concepts in is bad practice anymore, i.e., using a pointer arithmetic to loop over arrays instead of iterators or the like.
I didn't grok a lot of those concepts until I took computer architecture, which was taught in assembly language. And we weren't taught x86, but a toy assembly language designed for teaching.
Another big pain point I had in school is that every professor / TA had different opinions on what was a right and wrong way of doing things in C++. And sometimes their opinions would conflict with the damn documentation too. There's nothing like having to relearn core language concepts every year at the whims of professors. This is probably where most of my disdain for the language has come from.
the chance of you being taught correctly by your so-called "professors" (they are not professors unless they have been appointed to a chair) is vanishingly remote, but this has zero to do with the language
C and C++ are still horrible languages even if you want to teach those concepts, because of how many footguns they have. That's why Pascal was so popular as a teaching language, historically speaking - it still has pointers and other stuff you need for manual memory management, but it's much simpler and more regular both syntactically and semantically.
no, it has exactly the same issues as c and c++, and some of its own, such as arrays of different sizes being different types. guess why it isn't used anymore
Arrays of different sizes are different types in C, as well - this is obvious when you are dealing with pointer-to-array types.
That aside, Pascal removes a lot of UB and other footguns by forcing explicitness for e.g. casts and pointer arithmetic, or providing (verifiably safe) byref argument separately from raw pointers. Strings and arrays are a mess in standard Pascal, which is why everybody used dialects that solved them - most notably Borland's, of course, which was used for a lot of DOS and early Win32 software.
Anyway, I'm not suggesting Pascal specifically today. The point is that C and C++ were never good teaching languages, which is why something else was usually used as one whether we look at 80s, 00s, or today.
>However, there is value in learning some of the under the hood concepts such as
>[...]
>I don't think schools need to teach employable
My University taught the intro CS class in Scheme; years after I graduated they switched to Java and last I saw it was Python (based on visits back to campus and wandering through the bookstore to see what textbooks were for sale). I just checked and it still Python, based on the course description ("how to design and implement algorithmic solutions in Python"). I see a few 2xx level classes are in Java, and after that it stops mentioning specific languages.
Anyway, it's tough since there is pressure to teach the concepts, which argues for certain languages, yet also produce employable graduates, which argues for certain other languages.
Finding overlap is tricky... teaching theory in Haskell, under-the-hood concepts in assembly, software development gluing libraries together in javascript/c++, may in fact be the superior approach... but there is fatigue associated with learning languages just to learn more languages when maybe a nice general language that serves many educational needs is a better way.
Python might be the sweet spot to start out with, and indeed it looks like the 3 intro classes at my alma mater, are taught in Python. I'd like to think the driving force behind this is that 1) Python works well, and 2)using one language for first year students (well, 2nd semester 1st year or perhaps 1st semester 2nd year) lowers the mental overhead on the students.
Going heavy on C/C++ early essentially selects people that already come in with a programming background. Some folks don't get that, or not much of it, in high school and want to enter the field anyway. And I think it is fair for them to reasonably expect, like you can with every other academic field, that they can do that via the starting curriculum.
I have written maybe one binary search that went into production code in 20 years of software development work. It is absolutely an under the hood concept.
But knowing how it works so that I can leverage the concept efficiently is super important. Having a sorted or unsorted list/array/tuple/whatever-linear-thing and an functions that search them and then knowing what the performance characteristic will be like and how I should put those two things together is not something that can easily be googled.
I agree it doesn't need to be a first year thing, but it does need to be part of a robust computer science education.
Exactly. And understanding WHY you should prefer using a Struct (or class) instead of a dictionary / hash-map. Can you feel the PAIN of all that additional cost??
The Python / JS world is all dictionaries. Such a developer might never understand why their language runs slower.
My gut says any new student should start with an interpreted language like Python or JS/TypeScript. As that gets you to running code, and core concepts like variables, loops and if statements in little to no time.
However, there is value in learning some of the under the hood concepts such as pointers, structs, memory layout, endianess, pass by reference, compilers etc.
I don't think schools need to teach employable C/C++ skills, but C/C++ is a great language to play with and experience these core concepts.
However I'm not sure if the value in learning these concepts are real, or it's just my own interests/nostalgia. You can have a successful career in this industry without having to manage a single byte of memory, and it arguably makes sense to accept abstractions at their face value so you can focus on what builds your skills/product.