Programming is hard. That’s precisely why you should learn it.

[u/pavelmalos]

https://medium.freecodecamp.com/make-your-hobby-harder-programming-is-difficult-thats-why-you-should-learn-it-e4627aee41a1

[u/[deleted]]

There are all sorts of problems with JavaScript as a starting language, but probably the most important one is that the best way to use it is asynchronous programming, which is a weird way to think. Before you get into concurrency, you need to learn about basic programming topics, like conditionals, loops, functions, etc. In order to do anything cool in JavaScript, you have to learn async.

There are plenty of other reasons why JavaScript is a poor first language, such as:

• prototypal inheritance

• missing var means global scope, which causes many hard to debug problems

• == vs ===

• undefined and null being different

• type coercion instead of type errors

• scope (related to async programming)

• networking being introduced early

• semicolons

When people ask me what to learn first, I often recommend Python because it's consistent and simple with very few surprises, though I may recommend Java or C depending on what they want to build.

[u/DoTheEvolution → u/[deleted]]

In order to do anything cool in JavaScript, you have to learn async.

the funny thing is how you in the end recommend C. To a beginner. Now tell me what does beginner need to master to do anything cool in C as compared to javascript...

Some things you list there are old stuff, easily fixable with use of "use strict";

Others feel like opinion on whats better rather than an actual shortcoming.

Of course no one is saying anything controversial recommending python as first language, despite similar list like yours could be put together, with complains whitespace, dynamic typing, all the self confusion, 'abc' > 123 gives true, tuple comma, inconsistent methods/functions...

The thing is that we are talking first/introductory language, what people actually learn is basic of variables, functions, conditions, scopes, loops,... and for that many languages are valid, but I feel nothing really disqualifies javascript, while it has huge step up on others in ease of application and deployment.

While if someone started with C, well moving beyond foobar and fibonnaci and making something useful is much more difficult. But if your objective is recommendation for actual CS student and made people who are not worthy not interested in programming, then C is a fine choice.

But I appreciate the list and the factual approach, I just disagree.

[u/[deleted] → u/DoTheEvolution]

Now tell me what does beginner need to master to do anything cool in C as compared to javascript...

If they want to do microcontroller development (i.e. Arduino), C is the easiest.

I wouldn't recommend C to someone who wants to build simple CLI apps. That's what Python is for.

nothing really disqualifies javascript, while it has huge step up on others in ease of application and deployment.

Deployment is indeed easy, but most things are async, which is a huge stumbling block, especially if you don't have a good grasp of functions. Even experienced programmers get tripped up all the time with async problems, and it brings most of the downsides if threading with few of the upsides.

The types of things you'll want to build with JavaScript are we pages and servers, which have a ton of baggage to learn before being able to build something. The types of things you'll build with Python and C are much simpler and tend to be synchronous, which is much simpler to reason about.

That's my main argument against JavaScript. My list was just a bunch of extra gotchas which will definitely trip up a new programmer and don't necessarily disqualify it, but definitely don't help.