java

This might come off as yet another developer ranting against java, so let me state this before even stating my goal today: I think java is a neat language which shows off some good ideas that have clearly influenced the programming community for the past years. But, as highly as I think of java as a kinda good designed product and harbinger of very nice things, like the java virtual machine (cradle of fine languages like scala and clojure)and the widespread use of just-in-time compilation, I consider that teaching it as a first programming language is harmful, because in teaching it you have two choices: either delve into thorough and sometimes hard explanations as to why things have to be done the way they're done or resort to magical explanations: "write it like that because I say so". And both have equally pejorative consequences: the former leaves little time to teach the fundamentals of programming, like control flow, functions, recursion, environments/computational objects, logic and testing; and the latter sets a rather weak foundation which dooms the future of future engineers/computer scientists.

I'm gonna give a little talk about java to some people in a couple of days. Yes, java, the new cobol, the language I secretly know, lest I'm banished from the cool kids club. But it has cool stuff. The java virtual machine, the bytecode compiling, the support for unicode and the blessed jruby. I mean, we can run ruby on appengine thanks to java! So get that frown off your face and let me tell you 'bout something cool.