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Zero

In December, jQuery creator John Resig (who is now working as a coder for self-education startup Khan Academy) wrote a post about teaching JavaScript as a first programming language. I'm a big fan of JavaScript, and by that point I knew I was going to be teaching it to all-new programming students, so I read it with interest. As Resig notes, there's a lot going for JavaScript as a starter language, mainly in the sense that it is ubiquitous, in high demand from employers, and easy to share.

But after spending some time teaching it, I'm not sure that JavaScript is actually a good language for first-time programmers at all--and it has little to do with the caveats that Resig raises, like its falsy values or block scoping. Those are tricky for people who have previous programming experience, because they don't work the way that other languages do. But students who have never programmed before have more fundamental problems that they're trying to wrap their heads around, and JavaScript (in the browser, at least) adds unnecessary complications to the process. My students so far have had the most trouble with:

• Loops - JavaScript has two kinds, one for objects and one for arrays, and they're both confusing for beginners.
• Input - apart from prompt(), there's no standard input. Learning to write "real" inputs means dealing with event listeners, which are complicated.
• Output - There's document.write(), or alert(), or console.log()... or the DOM. I don't know which is worse.
• The difference between defining a function and running a function - including figuring out what arguments mean, and why we use them.

These are common beginner hurdles in any language, but JavaScript does not make them any easier. Unlike, say, PHP, JavaScript does not offer a loop construct that can be used on any collection (foreach), and it doesn't offer an output mechanism that students will be able to rely on: the console is developer-only, and the other methods (while simple and effective) are deprecated in place of the DOM for displaying information to users.

And don't get me started on the DOM. As a complex, tree-shaped data structure, it's already tough enough to teach students how to traverse and alter it. When you start getting into the common ways that JavaScript interacts with data stored in HTML and CSS, even in relatively simple ways, it becomes extremely confusing for people who have never tried to write a program before--particularly if they're not very experienced with HTML/CSS in the first place. Now they're effectively learning three languages, each with its own quirks, just to do basic things.

This quarter I taught Intro to Programming using JavaScript. I built a simple scratchpad for students to use, so they wouldn't have to install any browser tools or understand HTML/CSS, but the result felt clunky--a lot of work to monkey-patch flaws in the language for the purposes of learning. Next quarter, while there's little I can do about all-new programmers who jump right into Intro to JavaScript, I do plan on using Processing for Intro to Programming itself. While the language syntax is similar to JavaScript, the all-in-one nature of the Processing environment--an editor with a built-in, always-visible console and a big "play" button for running the current sketch--means that I can spend my time teaching the fundamentals of coding, instead of explaining (or hiding) the idiosyncrasies of scripting in a browser.