Some Difficulties of Learning to Program

Benedict Du Boulay

This article is a brief introduction to some of the issues that teachers of programming may find helpful. It starts by presenting a fairly idiosyncratic view of teaching programming which makes use of mechanistic analogies and points out some of the pitfalls. The article goes on to examine certain errors based on the misapplication of analogies as well as certain interaction errors. The main emphasis is on the notional machine both at the general level of understanding (and misunderstanding) the relationship of the terminal to the computer as such, as well as at the more specific level of understanding assignment. Notation and mistakes that poorly-designed languages can induce novices to commit are discussed.