Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!mailrus!ncar!asuvax!hrc!gtephx!reesd
From: reesd@gtephx.UUCP (David Rees)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Which language to teach first?
Summary: You don't have to talk about pointers to functions...
Message-ID: <44cb7970.f9df@gtephx.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 89 21:15:50 GMT
References: <8514@batcomputer.tn.cornell.edu> <14501@bfmny0.UUCP>
Organization: AG Communication Systems, Phoenix, Arizona
Lines: 23

In article <14501@bfmny0.UUCP>, tneff@bfmny0.UUCP (Tom Neff) writes:
> There is more than one reason to learn a programming language.....
> will be applications drones.  What you want ... is something that
> will give each of these groups something
> rewarding and revealing in terms of their later track....
> 
> The most important thing is LEAVING OUT spurious or unhelpful concepts,
> like line numbers in BASIC or pointers to functions returning arrays of
> structures containing pointers to functions returning... in C, or about
> half of PL/I. :-)  The simpler the better for an introductory language.
> All you really need to communicate to people is that a computer is
> something that does what you tell it to do.


It is not necessary to teach an entire language. One could teach C as the
introductory language and barely touch the surface of what can be done
with it. I still am drawn towards Pascal as an introductory language. It seems
to me that Scheme (and Lisp..) both would show a slightly distorted view
of programming languages in general. What I mean is that Scheme does not (in
my opinion) show a good cross-section of programming languages.
((((( It also has two many parentheses )))) :)

			-David