Post #46141

2025-12-09 18:29 UTC

I would suggest taking a look at Scheme or Clojure for somebody who has no development experience. The big reasons being that these are high level languages so you can focus on learning the actual concepts without all the incidental complexity of imperative languages. Scheme in particular was designed as a teaching language. The other aspect is interactivity, Lisps have a tight integration between the editor and the REPL and you can evaluate functions as you write them. This is incredibly helpful for learning as you can write a function, send it for evaluation, and see the result immediately. So you can play with code and get an intuition for how things work.

Replies (3)

@communism__dup_7961@lemmy.ml 2025-12-09 20:50

That’s a really interesting suggestion. I’ve not used either. I had the impression that those languages are kinda esoteric, but maybe I’ll have a look.

Open ##46513
@HiddenLayer555@lemmy.ml 2025-12-10 01:11

My university chose to teach a lisp-like language without for loops as they very first programming course in the computer science program lol. Everyone who “already knew” how to program hated it (including me at the time) because it knocked us from the peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve into the valley of despair like everyone else.

Open ##47360
@simonced@lemmy.ml 2025-12-10 03:52

Speaking of Scheme, I would suggest Racket, which comes battery included and ready to go in ONE installer. Easy to install on any system, and has a decent text editor/IDE provided. Also, the documentation is great, but can be daunting at first.

Open ##47783