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

Introduction Learning to program is difficult. We believe that a sub- stantial part of this difficulty arises from the structure, syn-tax and semantics of the programming languages which arecommonly used to teach programming. Programming language designers are (of necessity) highly intelligent experts in the field of programming, andare consequently far removed both temporally and cogni-tively from the difficulties experienced by the novice pro-grammer. This gulf of experience and ability results in lan-guages which are either too restrictive or too powerful (orsometimes, paradoxically, both). We divide introductory programming languages into two broad categories: special purpose teaching languages(such as Pascal [1], Turing [2], ABC [3]) and popular "real-world" languages (such as C [4], C++ [5], Ada [6], Modula3 [7], Haskell [8], and Scheme [9]).