Article View: comp.lang.misc
Article #361Re: Which language to teach first?
From: Tom Neff
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 1989 13:28
Date: Tue, 01 Aug 1989 13:28
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1396 bytes
There is more than one reason to learn a programming language. Some will be theoreticians, some will be systems wankers like myself, some will be applications drones. What you want for a "cherry" programming language is something that will give each of these groups something rewarding and revealing in terms of their later track. After that, they should split up and use more specifically appropriate languages. The most important thing is LEAVING OUT spurious or unhelpful concepts, like line numbers in BASIC or pointers to functions returning arrays of structures containing pointers to functions returning... in C, or about half of PL/I. :-) The simpler the better for an introductory language. All you really need to communicate to people is that a computer is something that does what you tell it to do. -- "We walked on the moon -- (( Tom Neff you be polite" )) tneff@bfmny0.UU.NET
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arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneffReferences:
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Path: arc1-ca.pugleaf.net!utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!bfmny0!tneff From: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.edu Subject: Re: Which language to teach first? Message-ID: <14501@bfmny0.UUCP> Date: 1 Aug 89 13:28:02 GMT References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <RON.89Jul28180503@Self.austin.ibm.com> Reply-To: tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) Followup-To: comp.lang.misc Organization: ^ Lines: 16