Re: Programming

[Dragos Ruiu <dr () kyx net>]

On February 14, 2005 01:16 pm, Ernest Nelson wrote:
> Most languages don't teach bad habits, bad references and teachers do.  You
> can learn to write bad cobol just as easily as you can learn bad perl, c,
> or vb.

Aw come on... It's way easier to write bad COBOL than c or VB.
But, actually, it's probably easier to write bad perl than any of those.

Call me old fashioned but I'm still of the opinion that the best language
to start out in is still PASCAL (for learning only, not for real code):

Small function set to learn, not easy to get lost in and wander
into the weeds in with some esoteric special features, strong typing,
all the basics covered, etc...

It's not OO but I still think that OO is dangerous, and you need to
understand algorithms and functional programming, before you
get enough OO rope to hang yourself.

Python isn't bad either and is OO, but imho provides too much 
stuff that can confuse/distract new coders. It also provides too much
OO candy to lean on so it doesn't force you to really have to 
understand basic algorithm knowledge that is crucial to 
building good code.
 
Don't discount learning assembler either. You'll never regret it.
(But it is daunting enough to dissuade the less dedicated
beginning coders.)

Java's not bad taken in isolation. It's only the evil thing people 
do with it typically that makes it inappropriate for beginning 
programmers imho. I don't care how many terabytes of RAM
or petaMIPS you have. 9Mb for "hello world" is just wrong.

my 2c,
--dr

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