The Universe of Discourse

"More intuitive" programming language syntax
Chromatic wrote an article today about The Broken Metric of "Intuitive to the Uneducated" Language Syntax in which he addresses the very common argument that some language syntax is better than some other because it is "more intuitive" or "easier for beginners to understand".

Chromatic says that these arguments are bunk because programming language syntax is much less important than programming language semantics. But I think that is straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel.

To argue that a certain programming language feature is bad because it is confusing to beginners, you have to do two things. You have to successfully argue that being confusing to beginners is an important metric. Chromatic's article tries to refute this, saying that it is not an important metric.

But before you even get to that stage, you first have to show that the programming language feature actually is confusing to beginners.

But these arguments are never presented with any evidence at all, because no such evidence exists. They are complete fabrications, pulled out of the asses of their propounders, and made of equal parts wishful thinking and bullshit.

Addendum 20070720:

To support my assertion that nobody knows what makes programming hard for beginners, I wanted to cite this paper, The camel has two humps, by Dehnadi and Bornat, which I was rereading recently, but I couldn't find my copy and couldn't remember the title or authors. Happily, I eventually remembered. The abstract begins: Learning to program is notoriously difficult. A substantial minority of students fails in every introductory programming course in every UK university. Despite heroic academic effort, the proportion has increased rather than decreased over the years. Despite a great deal of research into teaching methods and student responses, we have no idea of the cause. But the situation isn't completely hopeless; the abstract also says: We have found a test for programming aptitude, of which we give details. We can predict success or failure even before students have had any contact with any programming language with very high accuracy, and by testing with the same instrument after a few weeks of exposure, with extreme accuracy. We present experimental evidence to support our claim. certain to succeed. What's the secret? Read and learn.

http://retractionwatch.com/2014/07/18/the-camel-doesnt-have-two-humps-programming-aptitude-test-canned-for-overzealous-conclusion/ Addendum 20160518: Bornat has retracted the paper mentioned above, which was never published. He says:

In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that Dehnadi had uncovered the first evidence of an important phenomenon in programming learners. Later research seems to confirm that belief.

[Other articles in category /prog] permanent link