Mile
Zero

At this point, with the winter quarter at SCCC drawing to a close, I'd like to add onto my earlier comments on teaching JavaScript. I would still argue that it's not a great first language--too much reliance on other technology stacks (the browser, HTML, CSS), among other things. But John Resig's original post also talks about working around that complexity with libraries, and that speaks to a deeper divide in the JavaScript community: should newcomers learn "JavaScript," or "jQuery?" In this, I'm increasingly on Resig's side.

It's easy to understand why many JavaScript programmers are so adamant that newcomers should learn the language first. Sites like Stack Overflow are full of people whose answer to every JavaScript question is "use jQuery," even in response to simple problems that should be solved more directly. There are a lot of people out there whose idea of being a JavaScript programmer means "I can include jQuery and a few plugins on my page." Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But is the solution to teach people the DOM? That seems like cruel and unusual punishment--a kind of Protestant work ethic: real programmers suffer. The browser document object model ranks up there in the history of terrible API design: it's overly-verbose, inconsistent, and tedious. If you use it for any amount of time, you will end up recreating at least the traversal parts of jQuery--searching up and down the tree for related elements--if not the animation and CSS methods as well. Traversal isn't a hard problem per se, but as with anything involving recursion, it's kind of a lot to throw at a beginner.

In fact, it probably gets in the way of doing any real, productive learning. This quarter, caught up in the desire to do things "the right way," I taught JavaScript from the DOM methods up. As a result, we didn't get to jQuery until the sixth week--halfway through our time!--and several students asked "why would we ever use this?" The jump from the DOM to actually being effective is just too far for beginners, and without that reinforcement, they're likely to throw up their hands and give up.

The other argument for JavaScript-first education is that learning jQuery will leave you with blind spots in the underlying language. That sounds reasonable, but is it true? I myself didn't learn the DOM methods first--I started with jQuery, and then I picked up the lower-level functions as I went along, usually as a way to write more efficient event listeners or work with XML. I would have a hard time pointing out any ways in which learning jQuery held me back from learning the language.

I suspect the opposite is actually true: jQuery serves as a better introduction to modern JavaScript than the DOM methods do. Over the last few years, the way people write JavaScript has evolved rapidly: greater use of closures and functional coding, creative abuse of objects as hashes, and a variety of inheritance methods. Using the DOM will not help you learn these common patterns, while jQuery relies on them heavily. Teaching the DOM methods first means less time to cover the many uses of first-class functions, meaning that students who go on to use underscore.js or d3.js (among others) are likely to be completely baffled by the code style they see there.

Ultimately the call to teach "real JavaScript" first is exactly the kind of macho posturing that's far too common throughout tech culture, like saying that only assembly programmers are "real programmers" and only people who build their own computers "really understand" them. It's ridiculous there, and it's still ridiculous in the browser. No-one would suggest starting a basic programming class by introducing the Win32 COM API, but we're supposed to force JavaScript programmers to learn at the lowest, least-useful level of abstraction? Most tellingly, if you asked people who are advocating for DOM methods, I have no doubt that they're all using jQuery (or another library) when it comes time to get work done.

As with any subject, foundation is important. But that doesn't always make it the right starting place. When teaching bass, for example, we wouldn't make someone master chord theory before we taught them a simple scale. Instead, we can start at one level of abstraction and work both up and down. It's the same when coding: by starting people with jQuery, I suspect it's easier to get them into the DOM later. We can still teach the fundamental patterns of the language without being caught up in the implementation of a bad API.