A
Arved Sandstrom
It will enable them to focus more on programming logic
than on data types and various rules for those.
But it is a double edged sword. They may be up for a pretty
bad experience when they move to a more strict language.
That works both ways - I've encountered a number of programmers who make
a pretty mess of it when they move from "strict"
(statically-typed/strongly-typed) languages to less strict
(dynamically-typed/weakly-typed) languages. These are the coders -and
there is no shortage of them - that if you took their IDEs away, and
forced them to use API docs and a text editor, would have so many type
errors at first compile that it would be obscene. To me that means that
they lacked discipline and were relying on the compiler and their tools
to save them.
My feeling is that if a programmer starts out with something like
Python, and learns programming logic, then moves to Java and has a bad
experience because of strong typing, say, then they didn't really learn
proper programming in Python at all.
6 months is not much for learning programming.
I didn't mean 6 months worth of dabbling in programming on the
occasional evening, I meant 26 weeks worth of 40 hour weeks, or roughly
a thousand hours. If an aspiring programmer can't pick up adequate
coding skills in 2 languages (and by coding skills I mean some decent
ability to translate a problem solution into code) with that amount of
time, then I personally believe they aren't cut out for the field.
If the driver for learning programming is a wish to program
their Android phone, then there are some logic in starting
with Java.
I don't personally think that's the first project a novice programmer
should be taking on, programming smartphone apps. But I guess if you
wanted to tackle all sorts of problems at the same time then you might
as well throw Java into the mix as well.
AHS