which language to start with

El Corazon

The Grand Negus wrote:

Others disagree. Our first customer, months ago, wrote to us the same day he got the thing and said, "I wish I had had something like this when I was first starting out." But perhaps long-term support was not his primary concern...

hey, there are folks who love VB.... we call them brain damaged, not developers. What you have done is less than COBOL did and less important.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

El Corazon

dan neely wrote:

If possible, find a copy of L. Sprague deCamp's essay "English for hte Time Traveller". Even though it's a bit dated (the 'now' neologism examples are 50 or 60 yearrs old), it's by far the best consise example of how the English language has changed over the last few hundred years.

It is a great read. :) Though I think having cousins in Mississippi and a step-father from Boston, friends in Ohio and going to school in Tulsa, OK have introduced me to a lot of the lingual shifts within the continental USA. I'll stick with C++, less change even with the ANSI additions now and then. :)

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

DaTxomin

It has been said already. The most important point is WHY and WHAT FOR he wants to learn to program. If it is just for no reason whatsoever, you may want to take a look at Euphoria[^]. Very easy for beginners and powerful enough for interesting projects.

El Corazon

The Grand Negus wrote:

Seems a bit ambiguous, even to a human...

what??!!?? lingual shifts even in computer language exchanges in English... please tell me it isn't so!! :rolleyes:

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Christian Graus

PaulC1972 wrote:

Woundn't be good if one day it compiled a certain set of machine code, and then the next day, a different set of code behaving differently.

Well, that WOULD be more English-like, the soapbox is proof of that :P Your sig is strangely appropriate to this thread...

Christian Graus - C++ MVP 'Why don't we jump on a fad that hasn't already been widely discredited ?' - Dilbert

Dan Neely

I think everyone's missing a key point. Pick a language you know well. When you dad gets stuck, you want to be able to quickly give an answer, not spent 30 minutes googling for soemthing trivial.

-- Rules of thumb should not be taken for the whole hand.

Paul Conrad

Christian Graus wrote:

Well, that WOULD be more English-like, the soapbox is proof of that;P

Yes, indeed.

Christian Graus wrote:

Your sig is strangely appropriate to this thread...

:->

If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa

Joe Woodbury

I agree with the suggestion of first identifying what kind of programs he eventually wants to write. If he wants to learn just for the sake of learning, I go with C#. Amongst many other reasons is that the tools available are so more sophisticated than many of the alternatives. On top of that the amount of reference materials and third party libraries is big and growing. C# would also give him a highly marketable skill. For these same reasons, my secondary recommendation would be C++. (Yes, I know it's uncool to suggest C++, but it's still a damn good language and one that gives you a marketable skill.)

Anyone who thinks he has a better idea of what's good for people than people do is a swine. - P.J. O'Rourke

123 0

PaulC1972 wrote:

Well, C/C++ have been around for sometime, and I am sure they probably still be around 10 years from now

"Around" and "fully supported" are two different things. Tell Microsoft you'd like to write straight "C" applications and see what kind of response you get. It took a lawsuit just to get them to publish the flat interface for GDI++!

El Corazon

The Grand Negus wrote:

English will still be English

Will that be the Queens English? American English? Californian dialect? Texas Drawl? Southern? Bostonian? New York and Jersey variants? or perhaps even the slavic influences of the northern border states? Just which English will you use.... oh yeah.... YOUR decision on what English should be, what limitations, what syntax, and no other.... PAL will be a trained dog with far less sense.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Paul Conrad

Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:

Californian dialect? Texas Drawl?

:->

If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa

El Corazon

put them in the same room and watch the fireworks!!! hey... new years is coming up... hmmmmmm

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Paul Conrad

The Grand Negus wrote:

Tell Microsoft you'd like to write straight "C" applications and see what kind of response you get

:zzz: Who cares what Microsoft thinks? They won't listen to me, personally, but if millions of developers start saying they want C, they will get C. It's all about being market driven...

If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa

123 0

Christian Graus wrote:

'I said fish, and PE understood me'.

Actually, the Cal Monet "understood". The fact that he used a combination of internal mechanisms, originating in a variety of programming languages, doesn't really matter, does it? You said "fish" and you got one.

Christian Graus wrote:

You rely on google, which I presume was not written in PE.

We'd rather say, "The Cal Monet relies on the shared memories of his brethren around the world." And though Google's code was not written in Plain English, there's no reason why it couldn't be.

Christian Graus wrote:

OK, that's reasonable. If it can be made more flexible than it is now, then over time, I can see powerful, real world applications for it.

Thanks. Gotta start somewhere; we're at Kitty Hawk. The thing is heavier than air but it gets off the ground and we really are able to steer it a bit.

Christian Graus wrote:

The big question is, if you write a fat old English parser that turns English in to code, and the rules become loose, how will you know exactly what a line of code is going to do ?

Pretty much the same way we know that the term "height" in, say, a Pascal program, will be interpreted as a field in a record because of the enclosing "with" clause, rather than as a local variable, a parameter, a parameter in the enclosing parent routine, a global variable, or a function call. And y'know, sometimes we guess wrong; then we know by testing the thing. When I say to the PAL 3000, "Turn on the light" and he thinks I mean the reading lamp rather than the overhead fixture, that's not a bug - I gave him an ambiguous statement and he did his best to interpret and execute it. So then I then say, "Not that one, the other one" and get the desired result. I have the same problem with my wife and kids on occasion... Which is exactly the point I want to make. If we try to build a perfect machine that is immune to user error and that understands anything and everything perfectly, we're not going to get anything built at all. But starting somewhere is almost always a good idea. It seems that many of the people on this site would have told the Wright brothers, had they the chance, to go back to the bicycle shop since their "plane" couldn't cross the Atlantic with 400 passengers in less than 8

123 0

Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:

What you have done is less than COBOL did and less important.

But why do you feel so compelled to keep telling us so?

Paul Conrad

Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:

put them in the same room and watch the fireworks!!! hey... new years is coming up...

Oh yeah :-D

If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa

Paul Conrad

The Grand Negus wrote:

Quick Pascal on DOS

I still have it somewheres in my dinosaur digs :->

If you try to write that in English, I might be able to understand more than a fraction of it. - Guffa

El Corazon

The Grand Negus wrote:

But why do you feel so compelled to keep telling us so?

Because you come here, touting your software to visitors and regulars, like a pimp searching for a customer. What you are doing is taking advantage of inexperience of some people for personal gain. You offer the primrose path, but deliver the fertilizer that makes it grow.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

123 0

PaulC1972 wrote:

It's all about being market driven...

Which is why, setting out on a decades-long development project, we chose English as our programming language. We don't want our tools, techniques, and overall progress to be unduly influenced by fluctuations in the market place. And we're back to where we started.

Jeremy Falcon

Amar Chaudhary wrote:

what do you suggest

I think it should depend on what he wants to achieve with his programs first. Does he want to make games, web apps, DB apps, etc.?

Jeremy Falcon A multithreaded, OpenGL-enabled application.[^]