Re: Programming first steps.
On Mon, Nov 17, 2003 at 12:15:45PM +0100, Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Op zo 16-11-2003, om 16:44 schreef Chad Walstrom:
> > On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 08:45:51PM +0800, David Palmer wrote:
> > > I thought that I might make a beginning at learning. I've searched
> > > the web, found information that goes beyond the definition of
> > > plethora, so I thought that I'd ask here.
> >
> > C is useful, stable, has a huge following. C++ is useful, changing, and
> > has a huge following. You will most likely find people who know C than
> > C++, and you will often find C++ programmers who write mostly C style
> > code within C++.
> >
> > Perl and Python have different histories. Perl was an evolutionary
> > language whose origin was to replace sed and awk. Python was written as
> > a full-fledged programming language and benefits from this consistency.
> > (Can you tell which one I prefer?) Perl has its usefulness, but I often
> > hear of complaints over maintability when it is use in large projects.
> > You won't find that in Python.
>
> I have one grudge against python, though: its mandated indentation looks
> very ugly and unstructured to me. Kinda reminds me of COBOL (and boy, do
> I have nightmares of having to write COBOL code at school)
>
> wrt a good beginner's language, I wouldn't start with C or C++. They're
> both great languages, but if you've never done any programming before,
> they might be, uh, "confusing". I'd suggest finding some programming
> language with at least some decent string handling, bounds checking, and
> an intended audience of beginners. FreePascal is, I think, a good
> candidate.
I think the hardest thing about learning a new language is the
Libraries. Variables, method calls, operators, scope are somewhat dicey
to learn but you can pick it up in just about any language, once you
learn the syntax.
But to get a good education you need system libraries that do
sophisticated things with strings and files and other nice things.
That's why when I was learning I enjoyed Visual Basic so much: the
system libraries were relatively easier (and also less powerful) than
other languages. Microsoft's .NET class libaries are pretty easy to
learn; they're slightly less idiomatic than Java even though they pretty
much imitate them.
In Linux, I like GTK/GLIB programming in C. The libs are pretty
straightforward and complete.
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