On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 1:42 PM, Paul Cantrell via swift-evolution < swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
I think Python's biggest appeal to new programmers is the fact that it has
such a great standard library
This is not the case, at least in my teaching experience.
One of the largest hurdles for new programmers, and the one that
differentiates beginning languages more than any other, is compiler
strictness. This includes both syntax and static type checking.
We easily forget how hard learning syntax is: to see every piece of
punctuation as significant, to read code as a parse tree, to think inside
the box of the language’s type system. Programmers in their first months
easily spend 50% of the time getting their code to compile, usually more
like 80%.
The problem with compile-time strictness of any kind is that the compiler
won’t do _anything_ until _everything_ compiles. I’ve seen this drive
beginners to burnout, even drive them away from CS altogether. (To help
calibrate your thinking about just how much we’ve forgotten that we
learned: eons and eons ago, when my department taught its intro courses in
Pascal and C++, the main first-year hurdle was not dealing with unsafe
pointers, but knowing where to put the semicolons. Semicolons!)
When you don’t understand what a failure looks like, it’s tremendously
helpful to be able to actually run the code and see the failure happen.
Having the language say “this can’t possibly work so I won’t run it” is not
helpful to beginners; it’s just bottled frustration. Having the language
say “it worked until I got here, at which point this happened” is
infinitely more helpful.
The biggest hurdle to a beginning programmer is how _stupid_ programming
makes one feel. We experience programmers are all used to this. Beginners
are not. Their successes are rarer, the obstacles more daunting. Every
stumble feels intensely personal. Anything that makes success more
incremental and more self-discoverable helps.
• • •
You might think at this point that I’m arguing in favor of the “no types
to compete with Python” mode, but I’d vote against it.
The ideal beginner language has a flexible, forgiving syntax that rewards
guessing; the least compile-time type checking possible; and very clear
error messages (both compiler and runtime). On all three counts, this
sounds very far from Swift today. Better error messages would be good for
all of us, but the other two just don’t sound like Swift.
Good beginner languages reward exploration by empirical experimentation.
Good professional development languages reward clarity of intent. Those two
things are often in tension, and Swift’s core aesthetic clearly lands on
the side of the second.
Is making it a good language for new beginners truly a design goal of
Swift? I don’t think it should be. It _does_ seem like an excellent design
goal to keep the language as simple, approachable, and learnable as it can
be within its aesthetic.
Cheers,
Paul
P.S. The Bret Victor article that describes the thinking behind
playgrounds has some oustanding ideas on making languages more learnable:
Bret Victor, beast of burden
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
https://innig.net • @inthehands • http://siestaframework.com/
On Dec 5, 2015, at 6:13 PM, Austin Zheng via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
No, I don't. I think Python's biggest appeal to new programmers is the
fact that it has such a great standard library, making it really easy to do
whatever you want to do without figuring out how to find or add in external
dependencies.
Anyways, mistyped Python code still breaks, it just breaks at runtime
instead of compile time. In fact, I'd argue that this is even less beginner
friendly, since you might write a function that works with some inputs and
then inexplicably breaks with others.
Austin
On Dec 5, 2015, at 4:09 PM, Amir Michail < a.michail@me.com> wrote:
On Dec 5, 2015, at 7:05 PM, Austin Zheng via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
>
I disagree with the idea that a type system is too much of a hurdle for
beginner programmers to overcome.
Don’t you think that Python currently provides a better introduction to
programming due to its simplicity?
Austin
On Dec 5, 2015, at 4:01 PM, Kevin Lundberg via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
This is somewhat possible today on Apple platforms with AnyObject. You can
call any objc-visible method on AnyObject and it will compile, and the
return type will also be AnyObject (I don't recall if the return type is
optional as well or not). This doesn't work with value types, but neither
does id in objc.
Having a more complete lax typed mode similar to Python or php I think is
of limited usefulness, would add too much complexity to the language, and
yield too much uncertainty about any given piece of swift code.
--
Kevin Lundberg
On Dec 5, 2015, at 6:50 PM, Adrian Kashivskyy via swift-evolution < > swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote:
I can't believe I'm seeing a proposal to remove type safety, one of the
fundamental features of Swift...
Regards,
Adrian Kashivskyy
iOS Developer at Netguru
Wiadomość napisana przez Amir Michail via swift-evolution <
swift-evolution@swift.org> w dniu 05.12.2015, o godz. 20:51:
Python is still easier than Swift for beginning programmers. But maybe
such a mode can allow Swift to be used by beginners also?
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