blobcode - teaching go as a first programming language

I’ve been getting back into teaching coding lately, and coming back to it I had the chance to move away from teaching python, what we’ve historically taught in because of a myriad of small, irritating problems that exist in the teaching workflow.

So the question was asked - what language do we use?

Talking to my friends there were quickly very many suggestions. Java? Go? C++? Javascript? Rust?

Now before we get into things, I should metion that my first language was Unreal’s incredibly cursed version of C++ - so really anthing would have been an upgrade over learning that.

After a bit of discussion(read debate), we narrowed down to four main contenders, Java, Rust, Go and C.

Honestly any language “works” as a first language - a lot of learning programming comes down to learning fundamental concepts, and this is why languages like racket are common in introductory computer science courses. Ideally, though, we wanted a language that is low-level enough that you can work with some of the core aspects of computer architecture. This more or less takes Java out of the equation, as it (more or less) requires the JVM to work.

Secondly, a lot of us noticed that when teaching in a loosely-typed language, such as python, types often caused a lot of confusion over what type was implicitly assigned - and although to someone with experience it isn’t too bad, we often had to resort to “forcing” students to explicitly define types to avoid this. This goes hand in hand with language semantics - although languages like rust have a great compiler, a lot of language features that exist to stop you from shooting yourself in the foot add a lot of (for beginners) unwieldy language semantics. That more or less takes rust out, for better or for worse.

This leaves Go and C, and although as much as C is a classic for teaching and has it advantages in teaching how to effectively manage memory manually, go beats it out by a mile when it comes to cross platform compiler support, as well as supporting tooling and ecosystem. In addition, a lot of what makes go great for teaching is that it gives immediate feedback and a feeling of progress to students - they don’t need 150 lines to get a webpage up and running, and that combined with the very wide breadth of things that you can do with go, from kernels to databases to webpages to cli / gui apps make it great for whatever direction a student wants to go after they learn the basics.

what golang lacks

The one big thing that go is missing is a lot of OOP structures, and although this makes teaching in a more traditional style a bit more difficult, it is still very much possible to structure a go program in OOP style, which covers most of the key concepts, if we need to then is a good jumping-off point to switch into something like C++ or Java depending on the situation.

endnotes

I intend to let people know (after some more teaching) what some of the highlights and disadvantages with go are so far, so check back in a bit.