Re: A Quesiton of Numbers

I think that teaching beginners how to program with BASIC is not such a good thing. I remember how totally confused I was back in high school when I first made the transition from using line numbers to programming in Pascal. It was a nice epiphany once I finally figured that they just got in the way. Why not learn good programming techniques right off the bat? Of course, that was a long time ago. Maybe schools don't teach that way any more.

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Comment on Re: A Quesiton of Numbers

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Re: Re: A Quesiton of Numbers by samtregar (Abbot) on Jul 10, 2002 at 16:46 UTC
Should we start them on C++ or Java instead? Don't laugh, I've seen it done! As wrong as BASIC is I think it makes a pretty good starter language. Can you suggest any reasonable alternatives? -sam	[reply]
Re: A Quesiton of Numbers by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Jul 10, 2002 at 17:09 UTC
A reasonable alternative for BASIC? No, I don't think there is. Nor do I think BASIC is reasonable. But I do think there are good candidates for good starter languages: Python, Modula, Haskell, Java, and probably Eifel as well. Not BASIC, not C, not C++ and certainly not Perl. Abigail	[reply]
Re: Re: A Quesiton of Numbers by ignatz (Vicar) on Jul 10, 2002 at 17:57 UTC
Of all these Python sounds the most attractive to me. I think starting off with a scripting language simplifies things and it's enforced structure is a good habit to get into. The fact that it is open-source is a big plus for educational institutions. Someone who picks things up quickly can shift over to Jython and start playing with QUI programming. I know that I'd hate to start a beginning class trying to explain to people the point behind `public static void main(String[] args)`. I'm tempted to throw out Ruby, but it's something that I've only casually glanced at. ()-() \"/ `	[reply]


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