20 Aug
2001
20 Aug
'01
10:53 a.m.
R. D. Davis said:
Why not just start out with Modula-2? Of course, Forth,
Perl, C, VAX
Macro, etc. could all be learned by beginners if they had good
instructors to teach them
I'm still in the process of rewriting a bunch of horrible Perl code
to run on my NeXT (and off-topic machines) to do a weekly batch text
processing job. I would postulate that Perl, if allowed to be used without
"use strict" and the -w switch, actually *could* forever ruin the mind of a
potential programmer. (Much more so than BASIC ever could. Is that the
number 9 or the character string "9"? Who knows? Who cares? Eek!)
Even with those safeguards, the regular expressions could do some
long-lasting damage.
I dunno if this counts as a useful suggestion, but Mathematica's
programming language can be used to write programs in any of the usual
styles (procedural, functional, list-oriented, object-oriented). I don't
know that I'd want to spring it on a beginner, though.
I agree that a good instructor is key, no matter what "syntactical
sugar" is chosen first.
- Mark