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- Path: alpha.ru.ac.za!cspw
- From: cspw@cs.ru.ac.za (Peter Wentworth)
- Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
- Subject: Re: first language
- Date: 5 Jan 96 08:06:57 GMT
- Organization: Computer Science Department, Rhodes University
- Message-ID: <cspw.820829217@alpha>
- NNTP-Posting-Host: alpha.ru.ac.za
- NNTP-Posting-User: cspw
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-
- >I would recommend for complete beginner: Start with something fun
- >and high-level, such as PowerBuilder or Smalltalk. (Or, if these
- >high-level things seem too "squishy" for you, and alternate route
- >would be to play with assembly- which in its way is easier than a
- >high-level language, because nothing is hidden.) This will do a
- >few things for you: 1) make money 2) build confidence and 3) most
- >important, teach thinking like a programmer- in terms of loops,
- >conditionals, variables, functions, stacks, arrays, etc., etc.
-
- More and more these days I wonder whether this is what we
- ought to be teaching programmers. I personally think that
- the component-building aspects of glueing together classes
- is becoming much more important than loops, conditionals, etc.
- If you are a complete beginner, I'd recommend a language which
- emphasises the glue rather than statements and sequential thinking.
- Why not start with Delphi or Visual Basic? You'll learn more
- about software engineering, and less about "programming" that way.
-
- Peter
-
- --
- EP Wentworth - Dept. of Comp. Sci. - Rhodes University - Grahamstown - RSA.
- cspw@cs.ru.ac.za Knuth's Caveat: "While I have informally proved it,
- fax: +27 461 311915 I haven't tested it much."
-
-