[ On Monday, January 29, 2001 at 01:35:58 (+0530), Rakhesh Sasidharan wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: C programing
>
> Oh, Scheme (or LISP) is a wonderful language.  No, not just wonderful, but
> beautiful, rather.  The only thing I found didn't like abt Scheme was it's
> loads of brackets; else it is *the* best.

Very true, but I'm not sure it's really the best language to get a real
beginner started out with, at least not without a damn good IDE.

It depends on the person's mindset and background of course.  For some
people 'C' might be better, esp. on Unix where we've got all the good
tools (it's not really an IDE, but it is a good environment none the
less).

Both have simple syntax and concepts.

I personally started out with BASIC and various assemblers, and then
Pascal and finally C, lisp, FORTRAN, awk, and various so-called 4th-gen
languages, a bit of Smalltalk, and some SNOBOL, etc....

> Python has been known to be a very good beginners language.  Although, I
> wouldn't be able to comment much on that.  It is a very nice language, and
> even Guido's (the guy who made Python) tutorial is nice.  Actually,
> Python->C would be an easier transition than Scheme->C, as Scheme follows
> a totally different style of programming than C/Python.  (And more than
> that, once you learn Scheme, you might just find C programming a
> bore/below-class. :)

Hmm, yes, but don't forget Ruby and Smalltalk (aka the lang/ruby and
lang/squeak packages) too!

I personally don't like Python syntax very much though, especially the
damn ':' (the indentation is good and should be sufficient), and I find
Ruby much easier to read and understand (and it's 100% only object
oriented, just like Smalltalk -- it's just not written in itself).

For a real beginner who really wants to learn object oriented
programming Squeak is ideal because it's a full and complete true
Smalltalk environment, and it comes with lots and lots of cool tools and
of course a real full-featured IDE.

Ruby is similar to awk or python (or perl, yuck!) in that it's really
easy to get off the ground and just start doing stuff, and of course
Ruby has both Tk and GTK+ GUI toolkits too, so like Smalltalk and Python
it can be used for interactive stuff.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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