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Best way to learn programming:

1) Learn logic
2) Learn assembly
3) Learn C

At this point, two choices: stick with C or learn whatever high-level languages/paradigms suit what you want to do.

Almost everyone does the exact reverse.  First learn BASIC or Java, then attempt to understand what's going on underneath (and probably never get around to it).

If you go from the bottom up, each step gets easier and there's no mystery hiding what's going on under the hood.

>>76
Professionals focus on what they can do today, and sometimes they think about what will be possible in the future.  Academics focus on what will be possible, and sometimes they try to implement it.  Without both professionals and academics, we're fucked.

Look at those "professional" languages: Java, C++, and C#.  Their development is only possible because of the academic languages that came before them.  The people who designed these languages are academics and professionals.

Take Java, the waning king of professional languages.  When it was introduced, things like compiling to a cross-platform VM and using garbage collection were widely seen as quaint academic tricks that had no place in a production environment.  Today those are taken for granted.

Haskell is currently the big thing among academic languages.  Haskell has a few big features like better correctness guarantees, a wonderful FFI, easy parallel programming, and working STM.  Bits of Haskell will be in the next generation of "professional" languages, and you can either learn Haskell now, or wait until someone waters it down for you.

Why don't professionals use better languages?  (1) existing code (2) retraining (3) library availability (4) support

Academics are (1) writing new code (2) always learning (3) don't use as many libraries and (4) are expected to figure the damn things out themselves

Here's a tip for you: Microsoft is paying academics to work on Haskell.  It is all about the bottom line.