On Wed, 10 Mar 2004 11:59, Andrew Errington wrote: > Hi, > > I don't want to start a flame war, but I have a friend who wants to learn > programming. If (s)he is an absolute newbie then Squeak Smalltalk might be quite a nice starting point. It's both instructive and fun.
http://www.squeak.org/ http://www.squeakland.org/ The latter url is intended for the 'Young at Heart'. [ ... ] > I think C may be inappropriate for my friend, Having written a tutorial on C and been driven off by branch, if not out of my tree, by all the questions, I'm now firmly of the opinion that unless you absolutely must have the ultimate in speed C, and it's bastard off-spring C++, are both totally inappropriate for everybody. ( That'll get 'em going, just watch :-) > but something like Python/Ruby/Java might not be. Now that's better. Particularly Ruby. In contrast to the idiocy of having more than one way to do it, Ruby offers a nice clean and surprise free language. It's not as mature as Perl or Python, but for learning all that means is that there is nothing like as much bloat and extraneous verbage to learn. Ruby is stable. Ruby can be used very successfully for Web and database things. There are api kits to several databases and graphical widget sets. http://www.ruby-lang.org/ http://www.fxruby.org/ Avoid Java, imho it's syntactically as bad as C in many ways, and it runs like a sick dog. -- Sincerely etc. Christopher Sawtell NB. This PC runs Linux. If you find a virus apparently from me, it has forged the e-mail headers on someone else's machine. Please do not notify me when this occurs. Thanks.
