jC: Towards a programming language for beginners

There are numerous programming languages, some of them even exclusively designed for education, which converts the process of choosing a programming language for the first course a difficult task. When focusing in other engineerings apart from computer science, the desired characteristics for this language are that it is simple, i.e., homogeneous, and that it will serve as a first and firm step for learning other programming languages. Syntax is expected to be similar to the mainstream programming languages used in the industry (i.e., C, and therefore C++, C# and Java), and which probably will need to be studied in more advanced courses. Unfortunately, a programming language fulfilling all these characteristics does not exist, and that is why the jC programming language was designed. In this paper, the main points of its designing process are discussed in deep.