Post #849383

2026-03-30 08:11 UTC

You can tell I haven&#39;t been on social media much lately because it turns out I forgot what a bad idea it was to mention choice of first programming language to teach. I promise you, we have enough opinions of our own without getting more from strangers on the internet... (Don&#39;t worry, I&#39;m sure *your* opinion is the right one, though ;))

Replies (4)

@edwinb@types.pl 2026-03-30 10:28

Perhaps I should also add (given that I've just mentioned it and it was probably just as bad an idea...) that answering the question "What language should we teach first?" without first deciding what we want them to do with it (that is, at least, during the rest of their degree whether that's CS or ends up being something else) is probably also a bad idea. Anyway I still want to steal lots of ideas from Smalltalk.

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@RosaCtrl@social.vivaldi.net 2026-03-30 08:22

@edwinb now I wanna know your opinion because I feel I’ll be surprised!

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@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems 2026-03-30 11:40

@SusanPotter eee ❤️

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@0x2ba22e11@unstable.systems 2026-03-30 11:50

@SusanPotter the first program I remember writing that I found really useful was a CGI script I wrote in C to turn a text file with all my bookmarks in it into a web page. I ran it on a little second hand (very cheap) Pentium 1 PC. In retrospect I have no idea why C.

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