Re^3: Perl as one's first programming language

Your points are well made. I cited the examples I did because

I'm a dinosaur, and mentioned territory from my past (I partially paid for Sophmore year by writing and consulting SPSS)
there was a point (when memory and disk were expensive) that Fortran-77 had an incredibly optomized floating-point library. I realize hadware limitations are seldom a primary concern these days.

In the real world, I would never suggest a first language for someone to learn. When my son was in high school (10 years ago) classes in C++ were offered; the high school my wife teaches in offers classes in Java. Anyone interested in learning a language has more opporunities available to them than talking to me. 8-)

Having said that, I still don't know if there's a "one size fits all" first language, short of Logo in grade school.

How about you? What are your experiences? What would you recommend?

Comment on Re^3: Perl as one's first programming language

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^4: Perl as one's first programming language by Anonymous Monk on Apr 08, 2008 at 20:10 UTC
I suppose I'm also a dinosaur. My comment on Fortran was mostly to justify your college's choice in that era. Fortunately we live in a much better world today. My horror about SPSS was the main reason I even followed the 'reply' link. For legacy Statistics processing, I've seen more SAS source code floating around than SPSS. When our researchers bring in a Statistician, these days he's more likely to be equipped with R or S-Plus or Stata. But I'm a bit out of my field there. On those times I've been asked for a beginning language, I've pointed people toward Perl and Python mostly because of their approachability and general usefulness. SQL is a useful tool, but not for learning programming. Languages like lisp, forth & haskell should be picked up at some point by a serious programmer if for no other reason than to teach the brain to work in different patterns. BASIC is just harmful. My use of C had decreased quite a bit and these days is pretty much limited to patching FOSS to work on an older Sun machine.	[reply]

Replies are listed 'Best First'.

Re^4: Perl as one's first programming language
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 08, 2008 at 20:10 UTC

I suppose I'm also a dinosaur. My comment on Fortran was mostly to justify your college's choice in that era. Fortunately we live in a much better world today.

My horror about SPSS was the main reason I even followed the 'reply' link. For legacy Statistics processing, I've seen more SAS source code floating around than SPSS. When our researchers bring in a Statistician, these days he's more likely to be equipped with R or S-Plus or Stata. But I'm a bit out of my field there.

On those times I've been asked for a beginning language, I've pointed people toward Perl and Python mostly because of their approachability and general usefulness. SQL is a useful tool, but not for learning programming. Languages like lisp, forth & haskell should be picked up at some point by a serious programmer if for no other reason than to teach the brain to work in different patterns. BASIC is just harmful. My use of C had decreased quite a bit and these days is pretty much limited to patching FOSS to work on an older Sun machine.

[reply]