"first"

fun "first" language to learn.

I say first because I took C++ in highschool and enjoyed it, and I wanted to try common lisp but I'm not certain if its supposed to be a joke or not.

any help would be nice.

No, actually, that is exactly what programming is.  The computer you're "instructing" might be abstract, but it's still a computer and you're still instructing it.


Yes... that was about the core of my argument on that point. That's why any random assembly language doesn't have preponderance over say, Scheme.

But let's have an argument here. You think that the way to go is going up from a machine with registers, a stack and RAM and build up to C only. And that will teach a way to program, indeed. But it's not the essence of programming. Holding in your head the whole tower of abstractions down to logic gates is not even useful, unless you are an autistic savant of some sort (and this being /prog/, we can only be sure that you are a plain old autist), but furthermore, it's missing the point!

The point is to create those abstract computers and to be able to reason over them and create more abstract computers on top of it all. That abstract computer may be as simple as the Lambda Calculus or C, or as inscrutable as PHP, but what you will be doing is building up, not down, and thus I believe that it's best to learn of its value and form than to dig down immediately to a concrete machine.

I know that you are partly arguing for starting out with a simple model, but the important lesson is that abstract models can also be simple, even if they seem complicated to implement in C or Pascal or whatever.

If anything, the OP at least won't turn out like those Slashdot automatons that think that actually believe that C is all there is (not claiming that you are one, it's just that it's sad to see those folks just set on one thing they learned 20-30 years ago, or 5, if they are just trying to look old-sk00l).