I’d be tempted to say that ECMAScript Javascript is almost the perfect language: First class functions, Objects are just Hashes, Prototype inheritance, etc. I’d even be tempted to say that it would be an excellent language to have students learn as their first language, but I won’t. Why not? Two reasons:
There are far too many bad examples of Javascript coding practice available on the internet. Any student trying to find help with a Javascript project would have to wade through 9 bad examples before they found 1 good one…and how can you expect them to identify what is good and what is bad?
The syntax is too much of a distraction.
Now, that last point, to me at least, seems a bit ridiculous, but I just can’t get past the feeling that students would have issues with the syntax. Maybe that’s just me, and my years of programming bias speaking. At any rate, what I would love to see is a Javascript programming interface that was visual. Something where objects could be represented as boxes and function calls as lines. The killer feature would be a representation of the stack as functions riding along lines and popping off in order…
