debate

What do you think is the best advice for new members just learning to program? Not as in "go for it", but as in what language they should learn.

I want to get a good answer for my blag blog "Introduction to Programming", which I'll continue writing soon.

Personally I think it's best for people to start out with a high level language. I don't think they should start with low level languages because they have a much higher entry barrier and they'll have to deal with things like segmentation faults and memory allocation which I think will just distract people from their actual goal.

I don't have any problem with C or C++ (well actually I do, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion) but I think it should be learned at a later stage, if at all. Learning them will certainly teach you a lot about your computer.

I don't think people should start with "web languages" either. In the sense of using PHP to generate HTML. Firstly, they require you to know how to write web pages. Writing decent web pages is a motherfucking pain with shit like browser differences. People shouldn't have to deal with that when they're learning to program.

I think Perl, Python, Scheme and Ruby are fine languages that are all very suitable for beginners.

So tell me, what do you think?

one idea is to learn two languages side by side, one for theory (eg scheme via SICP) and one for more practical purposes (eg javascript)

despite the horror of making webapps meaning you have to know html, css, javascript, browser quirks, etc, it is very satisfying to be able to make something tangible. with bare bones html and a little javascript you can have an interactive web thing that is usable on almost every computer/device.

another thing is that the webapp environment is very "real world". it's a system that sort of grew organically and is full of cruft, awful junk that only exists for historical reasons, and parts of javascript are huge mistakes.

i think it would be useful, as a starting programmer to experience dealing with that at the same time as something more "pure" like scheme.