Philipp Ãberbacher wrote:
Excerpts from david's message of 2010-10-15 09:21:34 +0200:
Philipp Ãberbacher wrote:
About half of my fellow students are total beginners who've never
written or even read a single line of code. To them everything is new,
and they need to filter the essentials from the distractions, so less
distractions is a real help.
Perhaps that's why BASIC stands for "Beginners All-Purpose Symbolic
Instruction Code"?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC:
The eight design principles of BASIC were:
1. Be easy for beginners to use.
2. Be a general-purpose programming language.
3. Allow advanced features to be added for experts (while keeping the
language simple for beginners).
4. Be interactive.
5. Provide clear and friendly error messages.
6. Respond quickly for small programs.
7. Not to require an understanding of computer hardware.
7. Shield the user from the operating system.
Maybe. I've never written a single line of basic, but I guess many of
todays programmers have. Pascal might be another language of this kind.
I wonder whether it would be more sensible to start with a teaching
language like that and switch to something more common a little bit
later.
My limited experience with programming languages is that the important
thing to learn are the concepts underlying all of them. I think that's
where languages like Pascal might be good, since they're intended for that.
Once you have the concepts, learning another language is just a matter
of vocabulary.
My first programming was in BASIC, but I preferred Forth. I can read C,
Java and Javascript. PERL completely eludes my comprehension. I can do
basic stuff in Postscript or PHP.
I've thought about Ruby on Rails, or maybe Python.
My sister had to write a C compiler when getting her Finite Mathematics
degree. She's probably learned and forgotten more programming languages
than I've even heard of!
--
David
gnome@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
authenticity, honesty, community
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