[Joshua Zeidner]

  Seems like we have a lot of opinions here.  Here is a paper from ACM
on the use of Python in for teaching programming.

    http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=114017

  -jmz


On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:01 PM, Austin William Wright
<diamondmagic at users.sourceforge.net> wrote:
> Alan Dayley wrote:
>> Python.
>>
> Absolutely NOT PYTHON. It breaks the first two rules of programming, the
> assignment operator (=) assigns values to a variable, and always ignore
> whitespace. Well my first two rules, at least. Plus it sucks at
> consistent use of object-oriented programming.
>
> If you *really* need a general-purpose programming language, look at
> Ruby, it's slightly more well behaved. Slightly. I would recommend
> Javascript, it's a major programming language, and you can run it in
> your web browser with literally nothing to install. Plus Javascript is
> closely related to XML and HTML, while not programming languages, are
> markup languages (a way of storing data) that is becoming very important
> to know for many things. Though designed for the web, many of these
> things are finding themselves become part of everyday computing,
> especially XML. For these things, http://www.w3schools.com/ is popular.
>
> Any scripting language might be a good start at learning about
> if/then/else logic, but none of these languages are going to teach how
> computers really *process* or *store* information on the inside (how the
> CPU executes the program or how variables are stored in memory), or for
> that matter write an actual interactive computer program, you will need
> a real language like C or C++. After learning something like Javascript
> you will find C surprisingly limited in functionality if you try and do
> things the same way, especially variable-length variables like strings
> and arrays. Keep that fact in the back of your head for when, if, you
> attempt C/C++.
>
> Whatever you do, Google "<x> tutorial" should bring up something good.
> In the way of books, however, you can't miss ones from O'Reilly (
> http://oreilly.com/ ), they are jade/teal and have a random animal on
> the cover.
>
> Austin Wright.
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