I recently hired someone for my team who actually learned to program with Elixir! It was his first language, and his brain is sort of “unstained” by object oriented programming. I’ll show him this thread and if he likes he can write some stuff up here.
sergio
dimitarvp
This is not the article I originally remember but take a look at this one: Why should non-CS majors learn functional programming? | Computing Ed Research - Guzdial's Take
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patrickdm
josefrichter
Just to add: I’ve been watching Computer Science lessons from Berkeley and from Harvard recently. Harvard starts with C (plain C language) and then transitions to Python. Berkeley is ~10 years old stuff, starts with Scheme language (Lisp-style, similar syntax adopted by modern-day Clojure) and the first two lessons are called “functional programming” actually.
Anyway, the stuff you learn in “computer science” is pretty much language agnostic.. It seems to me it’s more important to have the syntax as clear and non-cryptic as possible so that you can focus on the concept at hand, rather than trying to understand the quirks of the code written in front of you.
Honestly, I think one of the safest bets and one of the nicest ways to learn is with Python and using Jupyter notebooks for that – it’s just beautiful, clear input, clear output, no IDE, no environment config, no compilation, no intimidating terminal, etc. And you should be able to go functional to large extent in Python too, if I’m not mistaken.
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patrickdm
Jupiter notebooks is a nice suggestion! I forgot a about it actually.. yes python is the mainstream options I was thinking about, even if I’m much more a rubist, and always had some hard times with missing ends and syntactic tabbing.. Python is really trending lately on the market, and this is an evident advantage. Thank you @josefrichter!
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Muco
patrickdm
I’m still in the planning stage and deciding if it will be Elixir, and I received good feedback about it here. I haven’t thought of resources yet, because it will be a complete beginner intro to programming and I will do the teaching in person, side by side. Also I’ll have to do the lectures in spanish. I will prepare soon a program of the course to draw an educational path into programming, from the very very beginning. I have many books and most are languages manuals, so I will pick examples out of them, from Programming Elixir and also the Elixir guides, but I think I really have to adapt my teaching to her learning needs and gradually improve the technical level. I will try to organize all the material I will produce, maybe at the end of this experience it could be useful for others too. Thank you for the question, it is a subject that deserves some more thinking.
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John-Goff
I personally think elixir is a good choice for a first programming language. Functional programming is a lot closer to what people are used to doing in math class, which is where most people probably had their first experience with functions. I’d stick to teaching the basics of programming, flow control, loops, if/else, maybe pattern matching, etc. Stay away from processes and OTP, at least at the beginning. Have your student make more and more complicated single threaded programs, probably running as scripts or in iex, until you gradually begin to talk about processes and concurrency. That’d be my approach anyway.
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dtew
I propose to take a look at google sheets as an option for an absolute newbie.
Stage 1: Work with formulas in the cells - this is ‘functional programming’ I believe.
Stage 2: Progress to functional JS (which is Google Apps Script) to control the spreasheet (allows for side effect like writing to spreadsheet or to docs for that matter).
Whatever your pupil learns is probably immediately useful and transferable and keeps the whole chain right there in their hands. They will have complete independence and power immediately.
Stage 3: If their interest has piqued then they can move on to control spreadsheets (or docs or slideshows or forms etc), via the google suite APIs, from Elixir/Phoenix.
Stage 4: Supplement reading from/writing to the google suite via LiveView (and of course doing things wholly independent of google suite).
(To be fair, stages 3 and 4 are are what I would like to be taught! )
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