An evaluation framework and comparative analysis of the widely used first programming languages

Abstract

Computer programming is the core of computer science curriculum. Several programming languages have been used to teach the first course in computer programming, and such languages are referred to as first programming language (FPL). The pool of programming languages has been evolving with the development of new languages, and from this pool different languages have been used as FPL at different times. Though the selection of an appropriate FPL is very important, yet it has been a controversial issue in the presence of many choices. Many efforts have been made for designing a good FPL, however, there is no ample way to evaluate and compare the existing languages so as to find the most suitable FPL. In this article, we have proposed a framework to evaluate the existing imperative, and object oriented languages for their suitability as an appropriate FPL. Furthermore, based on the proposed framework we have devised a customizable scoring function to compute a quantitative suitability score for a language, which reflects its conformance to the proposed framework. Lastly, we have also evaluated the conformance of the widely used FPLs to the proposed framework, and have also computed their suitability scores. © 2014 Farooq et al.