blog(first-language): add smallish changes and outline

Signed-off-by: Matej Focko <me@mfocko.xyz>

blog/2024-02-04-first-language.md

@@ -13,19 +13,20 @@ tags:
 hide_table_of_contents: false
 ---
 
+Let's talk about the first language beginners come into contact with hands
+on.
+
 I recall my first-time experience with programming quite vividly and also at the
 time of writing this post I have been teaching _Foundations of Programming_ for
 5 years already.
 
-Let's talk about the first language beginners come into contact with hands
-on[^1].
-
 <!--truncate-->
 
 :::caution Spoiler alert
 
 At one point or another, this post will turn into full-blown Python rant as it
-is the most common choice for the first language.
+is the most common choice for the first language and not very suitable in my
+opinion.
 
 I'm also purposefully leaving out educational “languages” like [Scratch],
 [Baltík] or [Imagine].
@@ -40,20 +41,21 @@ I'll start with my own journey, so you can take in account any bias that I have.
 
 :::
 
-I will describe my journey by taking two _very_ different paths, self-study and
-the high school experience. Self-study path begins just a year or two before the
-high school and majority of the time they overlap which certainly creates
-a unique experience.
+I will describe it by taking two _very_ different paths, self-study and the high
+school experience. Self-study path begins just a year or two before the high
+school and majority of the time they overlap which certainly creates a unique
+experience.
 
 ### Self-study
 
 My first time touching a proper programming language was around ‘11 and it was
 a VB.NET[^1]. If you have a look at this language, it is a rather verbose
 language. However if you understand English, it is very easy to read because of
-the said verbosity. When you dig deeper, you may find some very weird stuff
+said verbosity. When you dig deeper, you may find some very weird stuff
 going on, like indexing of arrays, or even allocating arrays that preallocates
 one more or one less[^2] element than the specified size. Syntax is also quite
-unusual with apostrophes marking the comments.
+unusual with apostrophes marking the comments. You could say each language has
+its own peculiarities.
 
 Overall it's not that bad and the book I've had[^3] was rather nice. In
 retrospective I would say that VB.NET is very nice first language, because it's
@@ -71,17 +73,17 @@ that consider C# the _Microsoft's Java_[^5], but you cannot hide the fact that
 in the recent releases there are features that are almost 1:1 taken from the C#
 and implemented in the Java. Most of them are _quality of life_ things that make
 the life of the developers less painful. All in all, there are still many things
-that you need to workaround in Java by abusing interfaces and design patterns
+that you need to work around in Java by abusing interfaces and design patterns
 and some of those things can be done in a very simple way in other languages[^6]
 
-Around the time of attending the high school C appeared in my life… I think I've
-seen C for the first time in the lectures from FIT CTU[^7]
-After C we have a mayhem of anything and everything.
+Around the time of attending the high school, C appeared in my life… I think
+I've seen C for the first time in the lectures from FIT CTU[^7]. After C we have
+a mayhem of anything and everything.
 
 Looking back I have to admit that I've managed to move from Java towards C# as
 the preferred language, though this has not been reflected in my professional
 experience (both working and teaching) and I haven't even touched the C#
-recently apart from the LeetCode challenges.
+recently apart from some LeetCode challenges.
 
 ### High school
 
@@ -89,6 +91,20 @@ Pascal
 
 Python
 
+## Common choices
+
+### Python
+
+### JavaScript
+
+### C or C++
+
+### Pascal
+
+## What to look for
+
+## My picks
+
 [scratch]: https://scratch.mit.edu/
 [baltík]: https://www.sgpsys.com/infovek/index.htm
 [imagine]: https://imagine.input.sk/index.html