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Blogger Carl Cheo, who maintains a website providing numbered lists of tips for maximizing online productivity, has pulled together an easy-to-follow graphic answering the newbie question "What programming language should I learn first?" (pdf here). Cheo chose nine commercially viable languages as possible destinations as the viewer navigates the flow chart. Further down the page, there are tabs with annotated links to educational resources for each language. So what's in it for Soylentils, most of whom I'm guessing were programming newbies in the previous millenium? Well, maybe you have nephews or nieces who chose the wrong major in college. Besides, the graphic is amusing and clever, though probably not the last word on the subject.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 24 2015, @06:40AM
BASIC (the original, not VB) was my first language and I think it was great, very good training especially for thinking in terms of loops. And it gave me confidence that I could master any other programming language or system, although obviously the others would take more time.
I appreciate that kids today wouldn't be satisfied learning a command line language that wasn't Internet aware. Sometimes, a step forward is a step back.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Sunday January 25 2015, @03:37PM
Thinking in terms of loops? What made Scheme hard was being forced to deal with recursion. Scheme doesn't have explicit loop constructs. You create loops through recursion.
Recursion scares a lot of people. Some programmers never use it. Recursion is not that hard, but the attitude surrounding it can be off-putting.