Is it sensible to teach programming with a language I don't know myself (yet)?

Question

I have a friend who has asked me to teach him how to program.

I was thinking that using a language that I do not know could be beneficial because:

• I will learn something new too.
• That will make me slow down, as I've been told that I usually explain things too fast.

So now I need to find some balance between what is didactic for a newbie and is useful to me.

My draft of requirements:

• Not C, Java or Python (because I already know).
• My personal interests now are on Erlang, Scala and C++ (but they might be too hardcore)... I could refresh Scheme or Prolog too.
• Need a good IDE or REPL to play with.
• Clean and simple language.
• Good (and free!) documentation.
• Some practical for the real world (i.e. making a web application, image processing, statistical analysis...)

About the methodology, I was thinking about this sequence:

• Introduction to logic.
• Basic maths and algorithms.
• Software design principles.
• Some foundations on computer technology.
• Make some large project.

So, any suggestions about the language or methodology?

edit:

My "student" is a 28 years old MD, his goal is to make a web site for medicine students. As he is also into research, so I think he could find immediate use to his new programming skills for data analysis and plotting.

Ultimately I might help him directly with the project.

Answer 1

I've done this in the past, and it works out to a certain level.

Basically, it works best if you are good at programming, and have a desire to learn the new language. You also have to be willing to put in the effort to prepare, in advance. The student should also be enthusiastic about learning the language. And make it VERY clear to your student that you are learning this specific technology.

Teaching this won't get either you, or your student up to an 'expert' level. It might only get you up to a beginner level, but as you pointed out, it will give you the opportunity to learn new tools, and perhaps become a better programmer in general as you have to explain things that maybe have become second nature to you.

Answer 2

Depends on how good a teacher you are.

One of my favorite university EECS classes was taught by a professor who was teaching the subject because he wanted to learn it. He had some really interesting fresh insights.

Answer 3

Will the student be open about learning from an impatient newbie? Wouldn't it be better to start off with something that you have a good grasp over?

Answer 4

Go could be a good teaching language (see Andrew Gerrand on Google+ )

1. it has a quite simple grammar, that should result very familiar to you (coming from C) and should be easy to start with for your student as well
2. you can already find good and simple material on how to do things ranging from web applications to image processing. Take a look at this interactive tutorial for instance.
3. it's neither an object-oriented language nor a functional language, but it has elements of both, which may allow you to make some easy point on solving some problems with different paradigms
4. as you mentioned Erlang in the list of languages you're considering, Go has some affinity with Erlang (in that it has a very strong focus on easy concurrency)

from your list of requirements, AFAIK, it still misses a good IDE and REPL, but it has an extremely fast compiler and even has an online playground where you can try building simple programs.

As for Scala, it's a language that I love very much and it could make a great language for teaching, but honestly (as a student) I wouldn't want somebody less than proficient with it teaching it to me...

Or (unless you have an allergy to parentheses) you could always return to the classics. As a response to your opening question (is it sensible to teach programming with a language I don't know), let me quote you something in the preface of SICP. I think it makes the point of why a language with a very light syntax is preferable for teaching about programming:

In teaching our material we use a dialect of the programming language Lisp. We never formally teach the language, because we don't have to. We just use it, and students pick it up in a few days. This is one great advantage of Lisp-like languages: They have very few ways of forming compound expressions, and almost no syntactic structure. All of the formal properties can be covered in an hour, like the rules of chess. After a short time we forget about syntactic details of the language (because there are none) and get on with the real issues -- figuring out what we want to compute, how we will decompose problems into manageable parts, and how we will work on the parts.

Answer 5

I think processing is a very compelling language for educational purposes. It has an IDE, is free, excellent graphical capabilities, and strong community.

If the student wants to do data analysis at a sophisticated level, R is awesome and popular. It also has a simple but useable IDE.

Whether or not these are useful/good for your student depends on what he wants to do.

If this person strictly wants to "create a website" I would urge you and him to avoid programming altogether and instead focus on a well-chosen CMS (for example typo3 or XWiki, etc).

Answer 6

Why your friend wants to learn how to program makes a big difference. For your friend, I would recommend python, which would be good for both web programming and research purposes.

If there isn't a compelling reason, I would be wary of teaching in a language you don't already know, because when you self-teach a language, you tend not to write idiomatic code at first. You write Java that looks like C, for example. Then you learn the right way to do things in that language as you become more familiar with it. I think it would be very confusing to someone completely new to programming to be told the way you told them to do it before isn't the right way to do it anymore. Also, unless you are actively working on a project in that language, the learning process for yourself is going to take a lot longer than you are accustomed to.

Answer 7

Go for C#. The Visual Studio IDE is excellent, and it's a simple language.

Answer 8

This is a terrible idea. The point of a teacher is to help the student avoid common mistakes. If you don't know the subject matter yourself, you'll be making those mistakes too.

You say you "explain things too fast". Now you'll be explaining things too fast, and incorrectly.

Answer 9

Ruby should be considered as well, especially since your student wants to do web programming (ruby on rails). PHP is a good introductory language as well and has a C like syntax.