In contrast to the New York Times article, Scott Hanselman talks about programming languages.
What programming languages should a New Programmer experience early so that they might be more able to “hear the tones later” when a new languages comes along? What language should a new programmer be exposed to first?
Source: Scott Hanselman’s Computer Zen – The (Programming) Language Explosion
I think language diversity is important.
I got my B.S. in the early 80’s, from a university (Southern Mississippi), that recognized early that computer science was constantly evolving. We went from Basic, to Fortran, to Assembly Language than Cobol in two years. After that we took “Programming Languages”. We also studied databases from a purely theoretical level since much of what was purposed wasn’t doable yet on a machine. That in additional to all the other “stuff”.
As a result, I have been extremely adaptable. I worked in an environment for 10 years where I was expected to implement the same functionality over several different types of machines while giving the user the same interface. As a teacher, I’ve had to move from QBasic, various forms of Visual Basic, and from Pascal, to C++ to Java.
I believe my early background has made me extremely adaptable, and I urge my students to do the same. I have many students who take Visual Basic their first year and Java their second, though more just learn Java in the two years. That maybe changing though. My current principal apparently does not like PreAP or AP courses.