HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Very insightful paper, thanks for sharing.

Firstly, I'm surprised that having no garbage collection did not make to the list of the seven deadly sins.

Secondly, someone here also mentioned about the very useful Turbo Pascal IDE and having an excellent IDE can really help in the visual learning approach that's required by all learners [1]. If any programming languages has the intuitive capability for real-time visual interactions as described by Brett Victor it will be great [2].

Thirdly, the paper failed to mention that beginner friendly programming language has a very high chance to be adopted by the industry and becoming extremely popular. This is self evident by the recent exponential popularity of Python. When the paper was written back in 1996, Python was just another scripting programming language with "Jack of all trades, master at none" language. At the time it's playing second fiddle to popular programming languages including Perl, PHP and TCL! The same can be said to D language now but as they've always said, time will certainly tell.

Personally I think D language did not tick most of the seven dealy sins boxes and have made the most of the seven significant steps towards more teachable language mentioned in the paper. It has the most Pythonic feel to it compared to other compiled languages. It also the has default garbage collection that will make it an excellent introduction for programming. Of course you can exercise bit manipulation like a madman with D (also cautioned in the paper) but that's only when you really want to after you've considerably comfortable with the language [3]. The only crucial thing that's currently missing is an IDE that is intuitive and beginner friendly.

[1] The Biggest Myth In Education:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhgwIhB58PA

[2] Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGDrIy1G1gU

[3] Bit packing like a madman (DConf 2016):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522040

⬐ bsder

In 1996, it wasn't yet clear that GC languages were going to sweep the field.

Yes, Perl was at its zenith. But Microsoft treated VB6 like a red-headed stepchild in spite of its popularity. Tcl was ... okay. However, Lisps were on the downswing. Java and Javascript were just getting started. Python was considered one of the many Perl wannabes.

Computer memory was just becoming cheap, and overprovisioning of RAM is what allows GC languages to flourish.

⬐ pjmlp

Visual D[0] for VS and Code-D[1] the VS Code are quite good developer experiences for D.

D is what Java and C# 1.0 should have been, I still hope that it eventually finds its place on the mainstream.

As for Python, and the context of the paper, I would say it has won BASIC's place. It even comes as standard on Casio and TI programming calculators now.

However Basic still has an edge versus Python, it was designed since the begining to be compiled to native code (8 bit systems being the exception), something that Python still needs to improve on.

[0] - https://rainers.github.io/visuald/visuald/StartPage.html

[1] - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=webfreak...