State of New Jersey needs COBOL programmers

[Fred Cisin]

>> I still believe that the best FIRST exposure to computer programming
>> should be BASIC.  VERY FIRST program should have instant gratification,
>> without having had to already learn underlying structures, variable
>> types, how to run a compiler, etc.  After creating first program, and a
>> few more, in a very short time, it would then be sensible to evaluate
>> what kind of programming is most interesting, and switch to the most
>> appropriate language.  Having already created a few token programs, it
>> is then less onerous to learn compilers, data types, system overhead,
>> "ENVIRONMENT DIVISION", etc.

On Sun, 5 Apr 2020, Toby Thain wrote:
> Sounds like you've never heard of Lisp.

LISP is a reasonable alternative starter language.
I PREFER  BASIC for beginners, because I have met a few that have 
difficulty fully understanding parentheses, and BASIC is a trivial 
transfer to FORTRAN and a few other languages in that group.