Do students' programming skills depend on programming language?

Abstract

© 2016 Author(s). Bachelor studies in Computer Science at our department in the last decades cover several successive core courses in programming: Introduction to Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms 1 and 2, Operating Systems and Compiler Construction. For a long time our intention was not to insist on the realization of subjects in a specific programming language, but to put emphasis on abstract reasoning and appropriate data structures and algorithms. Also, to avoid teaching different languages and programming environments, we decided to use one good educational language - Modula-2. In the last several years we were under different kinds of pressure to change the language. Starting from the last school-year we decided to adopt Java within the introductory programming course, using the imperative approach first. Some comparisons of students' advancements and success between Modula-2 and Java generations are presented in the paper. The results of the analytical evaluation indicate that the choice of the first programming language does not have a deep influence to students' success at the course.