Me: chooses English for language, French for keyboard (because that's what my keyboard happens to be), speaks Dutch natively

Windows: oh great! You've told me to display everything in Windows in English. So I'll just show you the Windows store in Dutch, French and English (edit, and Russian in one of the Store tabs, for God knows why), all at once! Because who cares about your language settings anyway, right. You appear to be from Belgium from your IP, so obviously you speak both of these languages despite your personal preferences. Additionally, have some Candy Crush Soda Saga that you've never asked for.

And the application that you wanted to install - Ubuntu? Fuck you, you can't install it, for "reasons" that we've conveniently put in French, because you obviously speak that, right.

HOW ABOUT YOU FUCKING GO FUCK YOURSELF, MICROSOFT?!

Still trying to get good.

The requirements are forever shifting, and so do the applied paradigms.

I think the first layer is learning about each paradigm.

You learn 5-10 languages/technologies, get a feeling for procedural/functional/OOP programming. You mess around with some electronics engineering, write a bit of assembly. You write an ugly GTK program, an Android todo app, check how OpenGL works. You learn about relational models, about graph databases, time series storage and key value caches. You learn about networking and protocols. You void the warranty of all the devices in your house at some point. You develop preferences for languages and systems. For certain periods of time, you even become an insufferable fanboy who claims that all databases should be replaced by MongoDB, or all applications should be written in C# -- no exceptions in your mind are possible, because you found the Perfect Thing. Temporarily.

Eventually, you get to the second layer: Instead of being a champion for a single cause, you start to see patterns of applicability.

You might have grown to prefer serverless microservice architectures driven by pub/sub event busses, but realize that some MVC framework is probably more suitable for a 5-employee company. You realize that development is not just about picking the best language and best architecture -- It's about pros and cons for every situation. You start to value consistency over hard rules. You realize that even respected books about computer science can sometimes contain lies -- or represent solutions which are only applicable to "spherical cows in a vacuum".

Then you get to the third layer: Which is about orchestrating migrations between paradigms without creating a bigger mess.

Your company started with a tiny MVC webshop written in PHP. There are now 300 employees and a few million lines of code, the framework more often gets in the way than it helps, the database is terribly strained. Big rewrite? Gradual refactor? Introduce new languages within the company or stick with what people know? Educate people about paradigms which might be more suitable, but which will feel unfamiliar? What leads to a better product, someone who is experienced with PHP, or someone just learning to use Typescript?

All that theoretical knowledge about superior paradigms won't help you now -- No clean slates! You have to build a skyscraper city to replace a swamp village while keeping the economy running, together with builders who have no clue what concrete even looks like. You might think "I'll throw my superior engineering against this, no harm done if it doesn't stick", but 9 out of 10 times that will just end in a mix of concrete rubble, corpses and mud.

I think I'm somewhere between 2 and 3.

I think I have most of the important knowledge about a wide array of languages, technologies and architectures.

I think I know how to come to a conclusion about what to use in which scenario -- most of the time.

But dealing with a giant legacy mess, transforming things into something better, without creating an ugly amalgamation of old and new systems blended together into an even bigger abomination? Nah, I don't think I'm fully there yet.

Let the student use their own laptops. Even buy them one instead of having computers on site that no one uses for coding but only for some multiple choice tests and to browse Facebook.

Teach them 10 finger typing. (Don't be too strict and allow for personal preferences.)

Teach them text navigation and editing shortcuts. They should be able to scroll per page, jump to the beginning or end of the line or jump word by word. (I am not talking vi bindings or emacs magic.) And no, key repeat is an antifeature.

Teach them VCS before their first group assignment. Let's be honest, VCS means git nowadays. Yet teach them git != GitHub.

Teach git through the command line. They are allowed to use a gui once they aren't afraid to resolve a merge conflict or to rebase their feature branch against master. Just committing and pushing is not enough.

Teach them test-driven development ASAP. You can even give them assignments with a codebase of failing tests and their job is to make them pass in the beginning. Later require them to write tests themselves.

Don't teach the language, teach concepts. (No, if else and for loops aren't concepts you god-damn amateur! That's just syntax!)

When teaching object oriented programming, I'd smack you if do inane examples with vehicles, cars, bikes and a Mercedes Benz. Or animal, cat and dog for that matter. (I came from a self-taught imperative background. Those examples obfuscate more than they help.) Also, inheritance is overrated in oop teachings.

Functional programming concepts should be taught earlier as its concepts of avoiding side effects and pure functions can benefit even oop code bases. (Also great way to introduce testing, as pure functions take certain inputs and produce one output.)

Focus on one language in the beginning, it need not be Java, but don't confuse students with Java, Python and Ruby in their first year. (Bonus point if the language supports both oop and functional programming.)

And for the love of gawd: let them have a strictly typed language. Why would you teach with JavaScript!?

Use industry standards. Notepad, atom and eclipse might be open source and free; yet JetBrains community editions still best them.

For grades, don't your dare demand for them to write code on paper. (Pseudocode is fine.)

Don't let your students play compiler in their heads. It's not their job to know exactly what exception will be thrown by your contrived example. That's the compilers job to complain about. Rather teach them how to find solutions to these errors.

Teach them advanced google searches.

Teach them how to write a issue for a library on GitHub and similar sites.

Teach them how to ask a good stackoverflow question :>

I was interviewed for a brand new startup, which is now worth +$20m, and I really liked the idea and founder behind. When I met with her, I was blindsided by another developer, who was gonna ask the questions (which is fair!) - I simply weren't informed.

The meeting went on, and seemed great, however we started talking about bug tracking, and I mentioned that I liked "New Relic" (no more!!) and he, the developer, obviously did not, as the mood suddenly changed and he started bitching about it being expensive, and that there were better alternatives.. The meeting endes shortly after, and I was told by the founder that she'll contact me.. Never happened. However I was told by the developer who was hired instead of me, that "another application was rejected due to personal preferences"..

May be small problems to anyone but me, but I just find it disgusting, and it's typical developers to be so high and mighty about their choises ("X language sucks, you should use Y")

I don't blame the founder at all, and I've supported their company since (minus ranting about the shitty product that they ended with)

If by coding style, you mean conventions and not design patterns, then I'm surprised no one has mentioned the official documentation nor the standard library of sorts. I'm relatively new in the industry but at least I'm quick to realize that every language/framework community tend to have their own preferred style; not a one-size-fits-all thing. And these preferences are usually set off by code samples from the official docs. This is true at least for the big communities where the official docs are well-written.

!rant

Since I see a lot of mixed opinions all over the place; is Python considered to be a "douche bag" language? :S
It just makes me feel self-conscious since that's the language I'm by far most familiar with... :( Should I consider focusing on another language instead?

Fuck <input type="time"> and it's automatic local system input presentation, there seems to be no way to force a format(without JS) discarding the local language preferences.

I'm going to split the time input in two <select>. Peace.

PS: AM/PM system, please die.