Hi Roman (and all), sorry for the very late response, but I still have something to say.
On Wed, 11 Dec 2013 10:30:10 -0800 Roman Parparov <ro...@parparov.com> wrote: > From recent talks with my friends in Silicon Valley, I hear that the > demand for Perl developers/devopers is on very decent rise. > > And you shouldn't teach your son neither Python nor Perl, but Scheme and > Prolog. :) > Well, ask N programmers what is the best introductory programming language and you'll get N + 1 opinions. (Here was my take on it - http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/computers/education/introductory-language/ , which I'm not sure is absolutely right any more, because I now have more than one opinion on the matter, and cannot decide). Back when I was tutoring a pupil who worked as a UNIX operator (= an underqualified sys-admin), he told me he's been asking people which programming language he should start with and some people told him to start with C, some to start with shell scripting, and some to start with their preference of Perl, Ruby, Tcl, Python, etc. Eventually, you may end up at a situation similar to the philosophical dog who is standing in equal distance from two equally delicious-looking piles of food, and the predicted outcome is that he'll starve to death. I.e: it is better to teach programming with a somewhat sub-optimal language than not to teach programming at all because you cannot decide which one to teach. Regarding the original post, as a Perl enthusiast, I don't consider Python as "the enemy" (see what Larry Wall said here - http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=larry-wall-all-truth-is-gods-truh ), and think it may actually make a better introductory programming language than Perl (like I said - I'm no longer sure). I started programming with some variants of BASIC that were available for the PC XT (the one on the BIOS, as well as BASIC.COM, and GWBASIC.EXE ): http://www.shlomifish.org/meta/FAQ/#programming_languages Was it the best choice for an introductory language? Probably not, but I survived and later learn many other programming languages and paradigms (and some people told me my code is quite elegant and it usually is mostly functional). Larry Wall also started with a variant of BASIC (a long time before I started learning BASIC on the XT naturally - also probably before I was born) and he became an award-winning and extremely influential software developer and author: http://www.shlomifish.org/humour/fortunes/show.cgi?id=larry-wall-lets-go-scripting-basic Regards, Shlomi Fish -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Selina Mandrake - The Slayer (Buffy parody) - http://shlom.in/selina I learned a lot from my teachers, and from my friends more than my teachers, and from my pupils the most. — Rabbi Hanina Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . _______________________________________________ Perl mailing list Perl@perl.org.il http://mail.perl.org.il/mailman/listinfo/perl
