Comment by geokon

Right, so... just don't teach Java and OO at all? They're not fundamental. Some of the ideas in that course are something closer to discredited.

Later

I edited "a lot of" to "some of"; I was coming on too strong.

This makes sense. You might not immediately need to design a complex hierarchy, but you'll encounter them pretty early in a lot of languages standard libraries.

The first time I tried to learn how to program, I was 12-13 years old and found some video from a university that started by covering Classes, Methods, and Objects.

I watched one or two lectures and it made no sense to me, so I gave up. I had no idea WTF "objects are like nouns and methods are like verbs" was trying to teach me. I just wanted to make my computer do things.

Around 14-15 I started playing around with my TI-84 calculator writing simple programs. The TI-84 used a form of BASIC where I could write a program that took INPUT and plugged it into an equation and print it to OUTPUT, and it felt so much more approachable than the neo-neo-platonist OO lectures I'd watched. From there I gradually started writing more complicated code until I eventually started to get why programmers would define functions to stop repeating themselves, or why they might implement custom types.

> So it's not that these are the most crucial concepts, but you want people to "fail fast" and have a sense if they'll succeed in the major within the first year

I'd instead posit that so many people "fail fast" with OO because they go into their class being interested in programming, but have no idea wtf is even going on with programming and drop it, because they're forced to learn all this inane trivia [0] and write all this boilerplate (define a class, methods, observability, return by value vs ref) they don't understand before they can even run a program. They think maybe they're stupid or not a good fit for programming and drop it.

IMO a better teaching language would be one that lets you opt-in to OO and functional features but also lets you write really simple programs like "take a number, multiply it, and print it". I think that's why Python is so popular these days. It helps that the lack of semicolons/curlies, optional typing, and modifiers [1] removes so many distractions and gotchas that stymie absolute novices.

I also think most CS educators do a very poor job explaining CS concepts to beginners without realizing it. "Methods are like verbs" is absolute nonsense without a moderate to large amount of computer science knowledge to contextualize it. Some of my teachers were actually pretty good, and I also don't remember much acknowledgement that programming didn't have to be this way but that the language/tool was designed that way because that abstraction comes in handy. That'd probably help a lot in retaining students who successfully suffered through their first semester of CS 101 in Java but hated it so much they decided to swear off programming.

[0] Always start your program with "public static void main(string[] args)" ! Don't worry, that'll make sense in a year, or in six years when one day on the toilet at your software engineering job you realize that it really was a static function returning void that took string[] args

[1] Static and Foo& are justifiable, although static should arguably be implicit for a beginner language. Forcing students to learn about final, const, val/var, public/private, etc. early on is just stupid. I never understood why these were actually useful, or had a good reason to use them, until I'd already graduated.