Is Swift 6 a good first language?

Using Swift
109

Having worked on an introductory programming book using Swift, here is my two cents:

Without question, the best "first programming language" I have ever come across was UCSD Pascal. It was simple, clean, taught good habits, and most of all....

To me, a good "first" programming language is one that can be taught incrementally, without having to use expressions like "Just accept this for now, I'll come back and explain that fully later." In that respect, Swift fails miserably.

Example:
So you've just finished teaching the student about scalar variables (Ints, Doubles, Characters, Bools, etc.) and now you're ready to move on to arrays (historically, the first aggregate/composite data structure students learn). So you tell them "Here's how to declare an array:"

And give them var a:Array<Int>......

Now you get to explain what those angle brackets are all about; except that generics are way in the future at this point.

It doesn't stop there, to do basic things the student will need to use various methods in beginning programs. Yet you haven't talked about classes, enums, structs, or protocols at this point. So the student asks: "Why are we using names like something.else and why can't I use periods in my identifiers?"

The list of little problems like this goes on and on. Not a chapter goes by in the book I'm working on that I don't have to say "I'll explain that further in a later chapter."

In many respects, I understand why some authors have taking an "objects first" attitude when teaching C++ or Java as a first programming language (an approach I totally disagree with).

After working a bit on this project, I begin to see the attraction of (Dartmouth) BASIC as a first language :slight_smile: .

Another indication of how good a language might be as a first programming language is the length of the book you need to write for an introductory text. Pascal, for example, could be taught in a couple hundred pages (and the student knew the language well at the end of that book). Modern books in Java or C++ are many hundreds of pages, if not over 1,000 pages (e.g., Introduction to Java Programming is nearly 1,400 pages) and it is questionable how much of the language the reader has learned when they finish the book. The Swift book I'm working on will probably hit 1,000 pages and certainly won't cover the whole language.

This is not to say that Swift can't be taught as a first language, just that it's probably not the best choice as a first language.

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110

You shouldn't have to do this in Swift. In my course, there is only one forward reference (where something is used before it is explained), and that is when using properties and methods on arrays.
I don't even mind this one exception to my "no forward references" rule, since it gently introduces the student to using properties and methods, before they have to learn how to declare their own types. At this point in the course, students are already familiar with variables and functions, so it's not too hard for them to understand that some things can have built-in variables and functions that you can access with a dot.

My course is probably less than 1/3 of that (it's not a PDF, so I don't count pages). A beginner's course should never aim to be complete. For a first semester, I teach only basic control flow, functions, arrays and dictionaries, declaring simple types, and conforming to protocols from the standard library.
Most notably, I do not cover object inheritance, declaring protocols, generics, concurrency, memory management, error handling, ...
These topics do not belong in a one-semester beginner's course, but rather in an advanced course. In fact, when I update the course to Swift 6, I will probably remove classes as well :slight_smile:

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111

Why wouldn’t you just use the shorthand var Array: [Int] as it shows to them how you might want to get data from an array. Generics are an odd concept to describe without context but you can hide that Generics are at play and can help them write concise Code.

Later, after teaching abstraction you can provide code like so

var MyArray:[Int] = [89,76,8,16,32]

func sum(In:Array<Int>) -> Int {
    var Sum:Int = 0
    for i in In {
        Sum += i
    }
    return Sum
}

print(sum(In: MyArray)) // 221

print(MyArray is Array<Int>) // true

This code would be a great way to introduce new Programmers. Apple’s Playgrounds doesn’t use Array<Type> and always uses [Type]. This is due to Generics being weird to comprehend.

Generics make much more sense after you talk about protocols and inheritance and front-loading a learner with more technical syntax is something no-one would reasonably teach a learner as it would delay their conceptual understanding and would become confusing as you stated:

This is a great reason to implement simplification of concepts which can be adequately explained with [Int]. I understand that Array<Int> might make more sense for experienced programmer which beginners, which are by definition not. Imagine if, for example, you, to explain an Int, you initialized them in binary like 0b01101. You would get questions that would be similarly out of scope. You do not need to explain concepts that require extra information when talking to a beginner.

Swift Playgrounds understands to not use generic syntax when using Array instances

in Answers.playground/API Overview/main.swift @ line 12-13:

// 4. Ask for a choice from a set of images
let animals:[UIImage] = [“🐌”.image(), “🐥”.image(), “🐋”.image(), “🐎”.image(), “🦍”.image()]

In Summary:
The code you presented to explain why swift isn’t great for initial learning is not beginner code. You may want to review apples own educational lesson plans as in Playgrounds before attempting to teach swift from a ground level perspective. Generic Syntax should be avoided and shorthand preferred in Educational Material until you must Discuss or Explain Generics.
Teaching even the easiest programming language using its most difficult parts will not be understandable to someone who has never seen it in use.

I hope that this can help you make more understandable lessons that still follow in your educational philosophy!

PS:
While BASIC is a good beginner language it lacks the ability to continue to evolve its usage as it is designed to teach but is difficult to use in production meaning that when your student has to ditch BASIC they will have difficulty with more modern programming languages. You may want to teach your Student on a C Family programming language, which Swift is, to help them be able to apply their knowledge of programming to a much larger variety of programming languages and be able to more easily comprehend other languages.

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