>>34
the people asking these sorts of questions aren't the sort that are going to be worried their apps running a factor of 10 times slower in Language X compared to c/pp.
I speculate that majority of people that post here who want to learn programming are because:
1. they want to
get into into game programming
2. learn to become a 1338 |-|3x0r.
Have you actually looked at the sorts of questions they ask? They're not asking about complex AI methods or particle emitters. They probably do not know what a scene graph is. They're not trying to get their heads around vector math or cryptography. Newbies shouldn't be worried about shovelling terabytes of computational and simulated data around a network. If they want to start their own 3d mmorpg, we should tell them go for it and expect to not see any graphical results for at least 6 months while they try to learn about the stuff involved in implementing one. For most of them, they just want to learn programming concepts and play around with some code. They want to learn the concepts needed to display and move a circle around on the screen. they want to learn the concepts needed to creating a
simple game or gamelike demo and then finally implement it. languages such as python and ruby let them
understand the concepts faster by lowering the overhead needed for them to experiment ie far quicker compilation process, not worring about pointer math and new and delete, useful higher level data type manipulation. sure, it's harder to shift bits around in the registers but they don't care about doing that.