If you were hacking since age 8, it means you were privileged.

[winterkoninkje]

All you hackers should read this. True to form, I came to hacking late, much despite a strong interest in mathematics as a child. (For those who may not be aware, mathematics does not have the same gender inequity problems CS does.) These sorts of privilege contests have always pissed me off, not just because of the machismo involved but also —though I did not have the words at the time— exactly because of their brandishing of white male privilege as virtuous and ideal.

Comments

[lindseykuper]

Thanks for the link. I commented over on Geek Feminism, but one thing I forgot to mention there is that sometimes, with those of us who started hacking late, it turns into a reverse pissing contest -- sort of a "Look how good I am at this now, with only n years under my belt -- if I had been doing it as long as you have, I'd obviously be better than you!" thing. I've certainly been guilty of that kind of bragging.

[winterkoninkje]

Yeah, you get that too. That's part of the reason I don't tend to bring up how long I've been programming for, let alone how long I've been doing type theory/category theory.

I bring up beginning with Perl more often because I think that's actually relevant. I started from Perl and have been working my way down towards the CPU (and pure theory) ever since. I think starting with a high-level language like Perl is best, because it encourages you to think with high-level abstractions instead of getting hung up on low-level implementation details. All the folks in my undergrad classes who started with C (or C++ or Java) had a much harder time grasping the algorithms at stake because they couldn't see the forest for the trees. If I were designing intro curricula, I'd be torn between teaching Perl vs teaching Haskell. The pure/strong-typing and lambda-calculus of Haskell are really important to learn early, but Haskell tends to have a lot of low-level datastructures which can distract from the basics. Perl is great for writing how you think and ignoring low-level details and paradigms, but it's also an untyped nightmare. C et al. are the worst of both worlds (low-level and no types worth mentioning), whereas untyped functional languages like Erlang and Scheme lay somewhere in between (lambda calculi, but still no types).

[lindseykuper]

I actually think C has something important going for it as a beginners' language: minimalism (small and internally consistent and not overengineered). But it's too low-level, and I would be nervous starting with C because I wouldn't want anyone to get the mistaken impression that C's types are, you know, types. I want a first language to be high-level, minimal, and functional (so you can relate it to the math you already know), which is part of why I think Scheme is great as a first language. Python's not bad, either. For a second language, some ML-family language seems like a great idea to me, but Haskell isn't necessarily the best choice, in my opinion -- I still want minimalism at this stage. For a third language, learn C along with learning to understand the machine and the OS. For a fourth language, learn a language designed for working on large distributed projects, as well as the tools that go along with it, and at the same time, learn how to work on large distributed projects.

[winterkoninkje]

C is definitely a language everyone should learn at some point. This is one of those rare times when I agree with Joel on Software: the two hard things every CS major must learn are pointers and recursion. But since pointers are evil, everyone since C doesn't give you actual pointers; instead they protect you from yourself via references of some flavor or 'nother. So if you want to learn pointers, then you have to learn C. It's a shame really. Though the typelessness of C should put you in the right mindset for really learning what CPUs are munching on, and why pointers matter.

As for Haskell, it is a very minimal language. Far more minimal than OCaml or SML/NJ, that's for sure. Let's see here: ADTs, parametric polymorphism, typeclass polymorphism, and laziness. That's about it really. There's some syntactic sugar here and there (user-definable infix operators, do-notation, list comprehensions, guard patterns), but those really are mere syntactic sugar for writing the same thing another way. The trick is, Haskell chose its primitives to be orthogonal to one another, thereby simplifying the language and also getting the most power for your buck.

But there's also the problem of being too minimal. The untyped lambda calculus is Turing complete and all, but jiggering around with it obfuscates your code away from the actual task at hand just as badly as C does. This is why I'm no fan of Scheme. Sorry, no. Not everything is a list; no more than everything is an int, C to the contrary. Besides, with the wide assortment of different macro systems, making math primops into folds, and yet distinguishing other functions as being regular functions vs fold functions, having side effects, multiple types of equality,... you can hardly call Scheme a "minimal" language in this day and age.