Published on 12th of February, 2010 · Updated on 17th of March, 2020

Overkill – Java as a First Programming Language

I recently talked to a student in my neighborhood about his first programming experiences. They started learning Java at school, and it soon turned out to be horrible.

A lot of us learned to code in languages like BASIC or Pascal. There was no object orientation, no sophisticated file I/O and almost no modularization… and it was great. In BASIC you could just write

PRINT "HELLO WORLD"

and you were done. This was actually a running program solving a basic and reoccurring problem: Output some text on a screen.

If you wanted to do the same thing in Java you just write:

public class Main {
  public static void main (String[] args) {
    System.out.println("Hello, world!");
  }
}

Do you see how much knowledge about programming you must have to achieve the easiest task one could think of? Describing the program to a novice programmer may sound like this:

Create a Main class containing a main-method returning void expecting a string array as a single argument using the println method of the out object of class PrintStream passing your text as a single argument.

— please just don’t forget your brackets. This way your first programming hours are guaranteed to be great fun.

OK. So what are the alternatives? I admit that nobody wants to write BASIC anymore because of its lack of a sophisticated standard library for graphics (Java doesn’t have one either) and its weak scalability. The language has to be clean and straightforward. It should be fast enough for numerical tasks but not as wordy as the rigid C-type bracket languages (sorry C++ guys). It should have a smooth learning curve and provide direct feedback (compiled languages often suck at that point). It should encourage clean code and reward best practices. One language that provides all that is Python.

And Python has even more: hundreds of libraries that help you with almost everything, good integration into common IDEs (PyDev in Eclipse, IDLE…), a precise and elegant syntax.

Here is our program from above written in Python:

print("Hello World")

There’s no need to know about object orientation, scopes and function arguments at this point. No householding or book-keeping. Yes, it’s an interpreted language, but that’s not a deal breaker for beginners.

If you aren’t convinced yet, printing and formatting text output in Java is relatively easy for an advanced programmer but the gruesome stuff begins with file input:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileNotFoundException;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.io.IOException;

public class fileIO {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String filename = "test.txt", line;
        try {
            BufferedReader myFile =
                new BufferedReader(new FileReader(filename));

            while ( ( line = myFile.readLine()) != null) {
                System.out.println(line);
            }
        } catch (FileNotFoundException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

I hear you say: “Dude, file I/O is pretty complex. It’s just the way it is”. That’s true… internally . But a beginner should get an easy interface. Python shows how it’s done:

file = open("test.txt")
text = file.read()
print(text);

The code goes hand in hand with the natural understanding of how the process works: “The computer opens a file, reads it and prints it”. Even a five-year-old kid can understand that. Nobody would start to explain: “Before you can read a file you need a BufferedReader that works on a FileReader…” even if this is precisely how it works internally. You want to explain the big picture at first. The elementary principles of teaching a computer how to do useful stuff. Otherwise, you will start frustrating beginners and fool them into thinking that they are not bright enough for programming. Programming is fun and starting with it is the most crucial step. So don’t spoil that experience with layers of unneeded abstraction.

Overkill – Java as a First Programming Language

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