An After-School Program Teaches Teens Java and Python

spectrum.ieee.org An After-School Program Teaches Teens Java and Python

The students also learn how to design board games and video games

An After-School Program Teaches Teens Java and Python::The students also learn how to design board games and video games

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The world can be so cruel.
Back when I was in school, corporal punishment was the norm. I would still prefer that over Java.
- We get it, you have no idea what modern Java looks like
  
  I know exactly what modern Java looks like, and it could be beautiful. But… legacy cruft and lazy devs make it painful. And tech debt, let’s be honest.
  
  I’d view a greenfield project rather differently, but those are unicorns.
  
  I get it, you have no idea what trying to optimize around an ever-changing JIT recompiler looks like
Java... I started with Java myself when I was a teen. It's not a good idea.
- I think Java is still a good language for beginners. The tooling around it is really good and it catches lots of issues at compile time.
  
  I'd recommend Python or JavaScript to beginners. Also, Java is dying out right now.
  
  Ditto. Been a Java developer for over 10 years and the tool maturity more than makes up for its faults as a language.
  
  In my opinion, C# would be better for this job. It is similar, but has many features that simplify the code, such as top level statements, LINQ, collection expressions and stuff like that. It's also way more popular in game development and that's what most teens are interested in
- Java is a great language. Still one of the most used languages in the world. Ditto python
Why after school? I was able to take programming classes in highschool in 2010. In the us
- 2002, but it was Visual Basic. I got a fucking C in that class because I spent more time helping other kids figure out the assignment than spending time putting worthless clutter in my interfaces to the teachers standards.
  
  Oh well. At least I learned how to write a GUI to track the hackers IP address.
Kids in Asia are way ahead of that. Some countries have had programming on their curriculum for more than a decade
- I had programming (Pascal) in school in a random-ass country in Europe 20 years ago (I was like 14).
  
  This has been widespread all over the world for a long time.
  
  At 14 I could barely get a for loop and if statement working properly. Pascal then VB for me, once a week for 2 years. Only really started programming in uni. Some Asian countries start in primary school at as early as 3 years old. It's as important as languages to them. By 14 they're already doing robotics and writing social media clones.
  
  We are quite far behind in the west.
Java is a good language if you're a beginner, but if you've already coded before in other languages, it's going to suck.
- Especially for beginners its a bad language. You have the understand artificial concepts about classes, objects, abstract states before you re able to learn the important stuff like if/else, looping etc pp.
  
  I would always give beginners a language which is at least in their way as possible.
  
  You don't really have to.
  
  You can just handwave public static void main, and only deal with primitives, then static functions, before introducing objects.
  
  That's what they did at my high school. It's weird, and there's much better ways and languages to introduce procedural programming, but it's possible.
- They should've just picked Kotlin.
  
  It also encourages good basic habits, such as not making a variable mutable unless you specifically need to (val is way more common than var, the IDE makes them very visually distinct).

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