Re: [school-discuss] first programming language

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Apr 08, 2008 at 01:59:08PM -0600, Scott Cowley wrote:
> I would start with perl or python.

I prefer either bash/ruby or kturtle.

bash is easy and practical but doesn't scale; ruby is aesthetic
and pleasing to think in but not as "industrial".  kturtle is
rather for kids or non-IT specialities (guess usual kids don't
really need neither C nor python, leaving perl alone).

This opinion also depends on how hard it's to find a reasonable
teacher for a given language or to obtain minimal skill with that
so as the code wouldn't be b*tt ugly (one probably doesn't want
to teach children that).

In practice, I tend to stick with bash and tasks like "fixup
*.htm from the school's web site into *.html, including internal
inter-file links".  You can do initial development, a demo, and
some refactoring/optimization in 45 minutes from scratch, while
the skill passed will be immediately useful. :)

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/