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What is a good first language?

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-06 16:45

My 20 year old brother wants to get into programming.  I want to set him up with a language that has these features:

1. Easy to learn, must have simple syntax
2. Immediate results, easy to make graphical and text outputs.
3. Fully featured language(I want him to be able to easily progress into more advanced stuff and not be limited by the language)
4. Fast(So he gets the idea of how powerful computers are)

Name: Anonymous 2009-03-07 4:01

How could syntax be simpler than Lisp's? Especially if you omit all the metasyntax; that sort of stuff will probably just confuse beginners anyway. Parenthesis means call a function, make sure they match, and use an apostrophe when you don't want to do a function call, or to refer to a variable name rather than the value. That's all you need to know to get started.

There are several good Lisp/Scheme graphics libraries, and any damn programming language can do text. It's certainly fully-featured, and has a lot of features that most so-called "modern" languages lack. For example, (/ 5 4 (* 3 2)) produces 5/24. What other languages named in this thread have built-in support for rational arithmetic? And really, that's pretty basic shit.

Typical Lisp/Scheme implementations have excellent interactive support, typically greatly exceeding what other languages have to offer. Python programmers like to babble about how you can type dir() and help() and so on, but can you debug, step through code, or trace function execution? Hell no. In Python you can't even set a damn breakpoint without typing a bunch of esoteric undocumented shit. Lisp's got everything else beat by a mile.

Lisp code is certainly fast, too. Many high-demand applications use it as an extension language, because it can keep up. It's plenty fast enough to handle AutoCAD, sound processing effects for Audacity, and speech synthesis with Festival, to name just a couple programs. Python and Ruby would choke and die if given the huge volumes of data that these programs need to churn through. Java could handle it... if you had 20 gigs of RAM.

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