[Joshua Zeidner]

On Sat, Feb 20, 2010 at 4:13 PM, Joshua Zeidner <jjzeidner at gmail.com> wrote:
>  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

  sorry wrong link:  http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1140123.1140177

       -jmz

>
>  -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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>
>
>
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