First question should be, windows or linux? For linux-based programming you're bound to get a dearth of advice. However if the friend is a windows user then winbatch is a good language to start with. It provides lots of the messagebox type functions so you don't have to learn about DLLs
www.winbatch.com and while theres a demo its not free. -----Original Message----- From: Jim Cheetham [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, 10 March 2004 12:54 p.m. To: canterbury linux users group Subject: Re: OT: Best beginners language? On Wed, 2004-03-10 at 11:59, Andrew Errington wrote: > I don't want to start a flame war, but I have a friend who wants to > learn > programming. The biggest influence on the choice of language would be the purpose your friend intends for their new skill :-) I also have a friend who wants to get some programming skills, but she wants them to be able to write web sites that do interesting things. After steering her away from ASP :-) I reluctantly suggested PHP, because there are lots of resources (and lots of beginners). On the other hand, if it's just an intellectual exercise, a completely consistent language would be great (i.e. not perl, which suffers from "there are too many different ways to do it for any set of examples to be wholly useful") - I've heard Ruby spoken of highly in this regard. If the purpose if to hack around on Linux machines, perl isn't bad because of the number of tools written using it. However, I don't think you can go wrong with Python :-) Good language, good community. -jim, trying to please everyone ...
