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Dear Sir/Madam,
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article. As someone who teaches programming at university, I was sad to find out that most top UK institutions begin by teaching students Java. Java has its merits. But it is an awfully large and complex beast for someone who has never programmed to master.
Most students are confused for ages and flounder. Languages like BASIC or Pascal where designed for teaching programming. Java was not. Nor was C or C++. Scheme or Haskell are already better choices to start with, although they already have powerful forms of abstractions, losing the connection to what the computer actually does. Most CS courses don't even seem to offer assembly courses any more.
I hope that articles like yours will be seen by both educators and operating system vendors. The beauty of systems like Linux/BSD/OSX is that they come with compilers for free, that are easy to install. It might not be BASIC, but at least you have the tools to start with something.
Best Regards,
Damian Dimmich
Canterbury, Kent.
