What do beginners struggle with?

[taf]

eureka!!!

today i read the following and i feel like all of a sudden a few ( obvious? ) things are finally starting to click / falling into place for me! here it is:

Jankó-Klaviatur | Rezeption

Arthur Rubinstein: „If I were to begin my career anew it would be on this keyboard“

WOW!!! i mean, isn’t this very similar to what we have with emacs / lisp / clojure?

what do i mean:

• clj is for experts
• average work experience of clj programmers is very high

but what is the eureka you ask? well, take a look at this:

Good resources to learn about emacs-lisp?

i know that some time ago, cs students at MIT were taught about programming… using emacs and lisp ( scheme )… now… this has changed… hmm… i may be mistaken, but i believe that they are using python these days as the main language for their programming intro course… also they have stopped teaching emacs… also the main intro text is no longer SICP… …well… in any case… i personally think that it would have been better to stick with lisp and emacs… also i believe that it would be better not to prov…

basically i was thinking, people really should learn to program in lisp, and if they later get a job using some other programming language, nop. what’s more, i always felt like people should WANT to learn how to program in lisp, because… that is what i would have wanted!

but let us look at some of the things that have happened in this respect:

• MIT: long moved away from lisp
• HTDP: in the process of moving away from lisp?
• university in tübingen: moved away from lisp?
• …

hmm… so… i suppose… here is the deal: if someone wants to become a ( professional ) piano-player, they are very likely to wanna start out using the mainstream keyboard layout, and piano-schools and teachers are very likely to wanna teach using the mainstream keyboard layout, and only after you have mastered the commonplace instrument are you gonna start looking for possible improvements / more exotic alternatives.

alright, but coming back then to the thing i have said about motivation, mentioning Feynman’s somewhat unorthodox lectures on physics; what i have just realized today, is that things just do not work like that! in other words, when thinking about an emacs / lisp beginner, to think of a university student is probably very much misleading. the person taking an interest in learning clj is very likely to be a seasoned programming veteran who is not worried about learning to program or finding a job at all!

bottom line, what i argued before may make perfect sense in theory ( why not start on the janko keyboard?! ) but in practice the argument does not seam to be sustainable under the weight of the contradictory evidence.