ONE’S
FIRST
PROGRAMMING
LANGUAGE
73
9
being taught to do quick and dirty (always dirty, never quick) run-it-once
programs
. . . .
Things will straighten out in time, I’m sure. It’s just that we are facing
a
generation
of
computational Flatlanders who will dominate the coding rooms
for a decade or
so.
These flatlanders will either be robots who code the same program over and over again
or, worse yet, be like the character in the recent movie ‘Being There’, who uses all of the
right terms but whose abstract understanding of them is void. If my inferences are
anywhere near correct, the first language does determine the mental set for the second
and other languages and we must concentrate on the teaching of programming as
a
concept and as a methodology not in Graduate School but from the start.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank
all
those who replied to my query, especially the people whose
responses I quoted above. Thanks also to Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Mike Schneider, Jeff
Schrager and Dennis Hamilton for comments and discussions based upon the first
version of the paper.
APPENDIX
(Text of original inquiry)
Youthful indiscretions, or is BASIC bad for your health?
There is at least one branch of Cultural Linguistics that teaches that the deep
differences in languages lead to differences in the way one looks upon the world.
(Sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
.
.
.
.)
I would be interested in hearing about experiences later in life of those who have first
learned a simple programming language (BASIC, LOGO, PILOT, etc.). In the world
of p-baked ideas
(0<
=
p<
=
1)
I have an idea that is about 0-48-baked (i.e. slightly
less than half-baked) and that hypothesis is that few programmers who begin their
programming life with a language
so
limited as BASIC ever significantly extend their
ability to make full use of the data and program structuring capabilities
of
higher level
languages learned later.
In any case,
I
solicit from programmers, managers of programmers, and teachers of
programming answers to the following questions:
What is the effect on later ablility to program of a person’s initial programming
language?
Is BASIC (or FORTRAN, COBOL, PLf I-you supply the name) a good or bad first
language? Why?
If the programmer’s first language is ‘different’ (e.g. SNOBOL, LISP, APL) from
the common languages (e.g. Algol, FORTRAN, COBOL) what effect does this have on
later programming ability?
If enough interesting or significant material appears, I hope to be able to put together
a report affirming or denying the hypothesis stated above. All contributions will be
acknowledged and
all