How on earth am I supposed to teach such a language to my first-year undergrads? 
-
-
Replying to @anne_biene @johnregehr
Why are you teaching C to first-year undergrads?
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes -
Replying to @johnregehr
Opinion: it is bad to teach new programmers C first because it is unsafe, but it is bad to teach new programmers Java because it means they learn while being ignorant of how memory actually works. I do not know what the compromise is.
6 replies 0 retweets 16 likes -
Replying to @mcclure111 @johnregehr
Ten years ago this was absolutely a problem, but in the era of Rust/Go/Swift I don't think you really have to choose between 'low-level' and 'safe'.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes -
-
...despite being unimpressed by Go as a general matter, I suspect it might be a kind of least-bad choice as a teaching language nowadays. Does it have good error messages?
2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @glaebhoerl @mcclure111 and
I'm also sort of unconvinced that Go is actually lower level than Java
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likes -
Replying to @porglezomp @mcclure111 and
It's (as far as one can tell from a distance) simpler, and has unboxed struct fields and explicit pointers/indirections (not sure if it has "stack allocation" to any greater extent than Java, i.e. whether it's just at the whim of the optimizer?)
3 replies 0 retweets 0 likes
Go is “just low-level enough to be dangerous”, in that you can easily think you’re able to control memory allocation in Go but in reality it’s all up to the compiler and runtime just like in Java
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.