Communications of the ACM
I recently had two CS colleagues (from different schools) make the claim that we shouldn’t worry about the programming language in the first course because it just doesn’t matter. They each believed that we should focus on the CS learning outcomes. The belief is that if students learn the concepts well, then the students can simply apply it to whatever language they learn next. Ben Shneiderman and Richard Mayer described it this way in 1979 (see link here):
Learning a first language requires development of both semantic concepts and specific syntactic knowledge, while learning a second language involves learning only a new syntax, assuming the same semantic structures are retained. Learning a second language with radically different semantics (i.e., underlying basic concepts) such as LISP or MICRO-PLANNER may be as hard or harder than learning a first language.
The empirical evidence I know suggests that the learning a second language isn’t easy for most learners. While there is typically transfer from one programming language to another, it’s not seamless. Tshukudu and Cutts have been studying what transfers and what doesn’t when students move between Python and Java (see paper here). David Weintrop studied students moving from block-based to text programming. Yes, there was transfer, but learning was slowed when they shifted modality (see blog post here).
