classiccmp-digest V1 #694

From: Mark Tapley <mtapley_at_swri.edu>
Date: Mon Aug 20 14:53:46 2001

R. D. Davis said:

>Why not just start out with Modula-2? Of course, Forth, Perl, C, VAX
>Macro, etc. could all be learned by beginners if they had good
>instructors to teach them

        I'm still in the process of rewriting a bunch of horrible Perl code
to run on my NeXT (and off-topic machines) to do a weekly batch text
processing job. I would postulate that Perl, if allowed to be used without
"use strict" and the -w switch, actually *could* forever ruin the mind of a
potential programmer. (Much more so than BASIC ever could. Is that the
number 9 or the character string "9"? Who knows? Who cares? Eek!)
        Even with those safeguards, the regular expressions could do some
long-lasting damage.
        I dunno if this counts as a useful suggestion, but Mathematica's
programming language can be used to write programs in any of the usual
styles (procedural, functional, list-oriented, object-oriented). I don't
know that I'd want to spring it on a beginner, though.
        I agree that a good instructor is key, no matter what "syntactical
sugar" is chosen first.
                                                        - Mark
Received on Mon Aug 20 2001 - 14:53:46 BST