The Solution First Programming Process—or “How Quick Fix is much more than a quick fix”!

Learning to program is hard and one major obstacle for students is getting to grips with the programming process itself: What do I do now, what are the next steps, and what end result do I want to achieve? Further complications arise as many, even simple, designs require quite a lot of code to be written that are just “stepping stones” on the path to a solution. Thus, instead of “writing the code that expresses my final design”, we have to “write some code that will eventually be used by the final design code that I hope to write soon.” However, modern integrated development environments have strong programming language support which allows us a programming process that starts by writing the solution code. In this paper, we will exemplify such a solution first programming process by a small example, and advocate that teachers take full advantage of the support offered by modern IDEs to teach a more natural programming process for our students.