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

    • jasondj@ttrpg.network
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • realharo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • onlinepersona@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        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.

  • soulfirethewolf@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • realharo@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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).

    • kaffiene@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Java is a great language. Still one of the most used languages in the world. Ditto python