Language wars in tech are common. Java vs C++, Functional vs OOP. If you're doing functional is your language functional enough? So to in CS Education. What's the best language for CS0? For CS1? Drag and Drop or text based? Functional? Object Oriented? Compiled? Interpreted? The battles rage on. One particular "war" that I've been a part of deals with the idea of a language's being authentic or real. I've been a part of this on two fronts.

A teacher in one of the CSEd forums I'm part of asked for thoughts on what low level language to teach. She also asked about scripting but I'm not going address that here. The question came, aparently due to state guidelines which were somewhat vague. I couldn't find the specific guidelines but I did find old guidelines that indicated that the course in question was intended to be post APCS-A.

Last time, I wrote about frustrations in trying to motivate myself to learn ocaml. I could see the strong points but given that I've been using Clojure now for a while, it didn't really hold any value added for me in my current situation. Next, I thought I'd explore Rust. On the non-functional style, my go to languages have always been Python for scripting and small things and C professionally.

Now that I've done posting about why I'm retiring we can get back to our usual blogging. I haven't really done anything technical over the past couple of year. The most programming I did in the past 18 months was a halfhearted effort at the Advent of Code 2021 event last December. I thought I'd see about picking up a new language to change that. In doing so, I was reminded of some of my resistances to learning a new language and how I've seen similar from self taught students coming into my classes.