this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2026
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Programming

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Hello,

I am thinking about teaching my students JavaScript first so that they can start creating websites and make their career, what are your thoughts?

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[–] Cryxtalix@programming.dev 7 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

No way it's C. The average student will go home and find that they can't do much of anything they like, with the level of C they know. Even printing a string is famously hard in C, they'll hate it.

The average students wants to build games, websites, discord bots etc. Javascript makes it easy, none are easy in C. Nothing drains their interest in programming faster than segfaults.

[–] resipsaloquitur@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

printf(“hello world!”);

If this is famously difficult to you, I don’t think computer science is your bag.

[–] Cryxtalix@programming.dev 1 points 4 minutes ago* (last edited 3 minutes ago)

Yeah it's not for the students! OP even specifically said they aren't CS students.

Now start doing concatenation, splitting, replacements, char/string/integer conversions etc. Students will start banging their heads against a wall, a wall that can only be overcome by studying the intricacies of pointers and memory addresses. They will not be producing results for a very long time.

I have no reason to believe this is remotely interesting to non-CS students.