How beginner-friendly is a programming language? A short analysis based on Java and Python examples

Abstract

In this paper, we are interested in criteria to help us choose a programming language for a freshman programming course. The audience is future engineers who won’t be computer scientists or IT professionals. We are therefore more interested in conveying elements of computational thinking and logic rather than full mastery of a given language. Following a rather exceptional situation where we had to give substantially the same course, in parallel, once in Java and once in Python, we relate here some syntactic and semantic aspects of the two languages which, in our experience, ease the teaching or learning of basic programming concepts. We argue that in quite a few cases, Python makes basic concepts easier to introduce because of less syntactic noise and less conceptual noise. We also propose a short list of syntax- and semantics-related desiderata for a beginner language—which neither Java nor Python completely answer.