Re: OT: helping son of a friend learn programming

Mr Soul <pcDAW@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I have been a software developer since the mid 80's. My preferred
language is C++ but Scott is right - Java is the language that most
introductory courses are in these days. Even Python is being
considered a development language (not by me).

It used to be that they used Pascal introductory programming classes.
And just like Java, it's a good language to learn programming in because
it has a lot of training wheels on it. And just like Java, it's a bad
language to develop actual applications in, but people did it anyway because
that's what they knew.

I still think it's good to learn programming the "hard" way using C or
C++ because you know better what the machine is doing, but Java is
probably an acceptable way to go.

If you're going to do that, you might as well just cut out the middleman
and learn assembler. (Which everyone should do at some point, but probably
not as their first experience programming.)

But don't count out Visual Basic
either for doing simple tasks. You can download "Express" versions of
both C++ and Basic from MS.

I have never really seen Visual Basic. Is it as apt to encourage bad
programming practices and spaghetti code the way that traditional BASIC
did?
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."
.

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