How to teach programming?

What approach should we use for newbie programmers? What languages should we recommend and use to let novice programmers learn the craft?

In the nineteen-eighties, with the early microcomputers (Radio Shack TRS-80, Apple II, and Commodore 64) and early PCs (IBM PC and IBM XT), the natural choices were BASIC and Pascal. Both languages were designed as teaching languages, and interpreters and compilers were readily available (books, too).

Over time, fashions in programming languages changed, and the industry shifted from BASIC and Pascal to C, and then to C++, and then to Java, and now to either C# or Python.

I consider C# (and its .NET framework) a competent language, but not a teaching language. It is too complex, too encompassing, too high of a climb for a simple program. I have the same complaint of Java.

Part of my reluctance for C# and Java is their object-orientedness. While object-oriented programming is currently accepted as the norm, I am not convinced that a person should learn O-O techniques from the start. Teaching someone object-oriented programming takes some amount of time, which delays their effectiveness. Also, it may bond the student to object-oriented programming and prevent a move to another programming form in the future.

Object-oriented programming is popular now, but I foresee a day when it is deprecated, looked upon as archaic. (Just as plain old procedural programming is viewed today.)

If we teach new programmers the techniques of object-oriented programming, will they be able to move to something like functional programming? Or will they accept object-oriented programming as The Way Things Ought To Be and resist different programming paradigms? One advantage of BASIC (Dartmouth BASIC, not Visual Basic with its sophisticated constructs) was that we students knew that things could be better. We saw the limitations of the language, and yearned for a better world. When object-oriented programming came along, we jumped at the chance to visit a better world.

If I have fourteen weeks (the length of a typical college semester) I would structure the "CS 101 Intro to Programming" with a mix of languages. I would use BASIC and Pascal, to teach the basic concepts of programming (statements, assignments, variables, arrays, loops, decisions, interpreters, and compilers). I would have a second class for "CS 102 Intermediate  Programming" with Java and Ruby for Object-Oriented programming concepts.

For the serious students, I would have a "CS 121/122 Advanced Programming" pair of classes with assembly language and C, and advanced classes of "CS 215" with LISP and "CS 325/326 Functional Programming" with Haskell.

That's a lot of hours, possibly more than the typical undergraduate wants (or needs) and most likely more than the deans want to allocate to programming.

So the one thing I would do, regardless of the time allocated to programming classes and the number of languages, is design classes to let students learn in pairs. Just as Agile Programming uses pair development to build quality programs, I would use paired learning to build deeper knowledge of the material.