Red Echo

June 23, 2008

Seven Deadly Sins of Introductory Programming Language Design.

We discuss seven undesirable features common to many programming languages used to teach first-time programmers, and illustrate typical pedagogical difficulties which stem from them with examples drawn from the programming languages ABC, Ada, C, C++, Eiffel, Haskell, LISP, Modula 3, Pascal, Prolog, Scheme, and Turing. We propose seven language design (or selection) principles which may reduce the incidence of such undesirable features.