http://brianwill.net/blog/2007/01/14/pygeon-a-new-educational-programming-language/ Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:32:45 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 hourly 1 http://brianwill.net/blog/2007/01/14/pygeon-a-new-educational-programming-language/comment-page-1/#comment-463 BrianWill.net » Blog Archive » Syntax does/doesn’t matter Wed, 31 Jan 2007 15:35:42 +0000 http://brianwill.net/blog/2007/01/14/pygeon-a-new-educational-programming-language/#comment-463 [...] My main purpose in proposing a new educational programming language is to give learners a language that expresses the core features common to modern languages in the syntactically most direct and obvious way possible. So for instance, abbreviations that are non-obvious to a programmer must be excised from the language, including the libraries, e.g. the language can’t have anything like C’s “stdio” (”standard input/output”) or “sprintf” (”string print formatted”). (Such abbreviations would be more forgivable if full-names were given in learning materials, but out of the dozens of tutorials and references of the C language I have read, only a couple do so.) Taken individually, shortcuts like these may seem like small hurdles to the initiated, but only because the initiated can no longer see how non-obvious such shortcuts are. The small hurdles quickly add up. Every quirk, every historical legacy, every shortcut is one more thing which at some point is going to cause the learner frustration, possibly halting their progress. [...] [...] My main purpose in proposing a new educational programming language is to give learners a language that expresses the core features common to modern languages in the syntactically most direct and obvious way possible. So for instance, abbreviations that are non-obvious to a programmer must be excised from the language, including the libraries, e.g. the language can’t have anything like C’s “stdio” (”standard input/output”) or “sprintf” (”string print formatted”). (Such abbreviations would be more forgivable if full-names were given in learning materials, but out of the dozens of tutorials and references of the C language I have read, only a couple do so.) Taken individually, shortcuts like these may seem like small hurdles to the initiated, but only because the initiated can no longer see how non-obvious such shortcuts are. The small hurdles quickly add up. Every quirk, every historical legacy, every shortcut is one more thing which at some point is going to cause the learner frustration, possibly halting their progress. [...]

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