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August 15, 2012

Filed under: tech»education

VM Where?

My third quarter of teaching Intro to Programming and Intro to JavaScript at SCCC ends today. Over the last eight months, I've learned a bit about what gives new programmers trouble, and how to teach around those problems. I definitely wouldn't suggest JavaScript as a first language unless the students already know HTML and CSS very well--otherwise, they're learning three languages at once, and that's more than a little overwhelming.

Outside of class I've also started to daydream about ways to teach the basics of programming, not just for web development, but in general. I think a simpler (but still dynamic) language is probably best for beginners--even though I think its whitespace model is insane, Python (or its cheery little cousin Ruby) would probably be a good option. It's got a good library, not a lot of punctuation or syntax, and it would get people to indent their code (which, for some reason that I can't understand, is like pulling teeth no matter how many times you show people that it makes the code more readable). More importantly, it's straightforward imperative code--none of the crazy functional malarkey that emerges, marmot-like, whenever JavaScript starts doing any kind of user interaction or timing. And people actually use Python, so it's not like you're teaching them Lisp or something.

But let's pretend we weren't bound by the idea of "teach skills that are directly marketable"--i.e., let's pretend I'm not working for a community college (note: there's nothing wrong with teaching marketable skills, it's just a thought exercise). What's a good way to introduce people to the basic problems of programming, like looping and conditionals and syntax?

What about assembly?

Let's go ahead and get some reasons out of the way as to why you shouldn't teach programming with assembly. First, it offers no abstractions or standard libraries, so students won't be learning any immediately-useful skills for outside the classroom. It's architecture-specific, meaning they probably can't even take it from one computer to another. And of course, assembly is not friendly. It doesn't have nice, easy-to-type keywords like "print" and "echo" and "document.getElementById" (okay, so that's not all bad).

What you gain, given the right choice of architecture, is simplicity. Assembly does not give you syntax for loops, or for functions. It doesn't give you structures. You get some memory, a few registers to serve as variables, and some very basic control structures. It's like BASIC, but without all the user-friendliness. Students who have trouble keeping track of what their loops are doing, or how functions work, might respond better to the simple Turing tape-like flow of assembly.

But note that huge caveat: given the right choice of architecture. Ideally, you want a very short set of instructions, so students don't have to learn very much. That probably rules out x86. 6502 has a reasonably small set of opcodes, but they're organized in that hilarious table depending on what goes where and what addressing scheme you're in, which is kind of crazy. 68000 looks like a bigger version of 6502 to me. Chip-8 might work, but I don't really like the sprite system. I'd rather just have text output. What we need is an artificial VM designed for teaching--something that's minimal but fun to work with.

That's why I'm really interested in 0x10c, the space exploration game that's in development by Notch, the creator of Minecraft. The game will include an emulated CPU to run ship functions and other software, and it's programmed in a very simple, friendly form of assembly. There are a ton of people already writing tools for it, including virtual screen access--and the game's not even out yet. It's going to be a really great tool for teaching some people how computers work at a low level (in a simplified model, of course).

I'm not the first person to wonder if assembler could make a decent teaching tool. And I'm not convinced it actually would--it's certainly not going to do anything but confuse and frustrate my web development students. But I do think programming instruction requires a language that, against some conventional wisdom, isn't too high level. JavaScript's functions are great, but they're too abstract to translate well for most students--this and the DOM form a serious conceptual barrier to entry. On the other hand, students need to feel effective to keep their attention, meaning that it shouldn't take 50 lines of opcodes to print "hello, world." That flaw may make assembly itself ineffective, but thinking about what it does teach effectively may give us a better frame of reference for teaching with other toolkits.

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