Personally, I think everyone should learn a functional programming language, and the sooner the better. The functional paradigm is already playing a big role in the emerging multicore/distributed world we live in.
Erlang, Haskell, Ocaml are all great free, open source choices. Yea, and on .NET there's F# (which is roughly speaking a port of Ocaml to .NET). Whatever he learns on .NET, if he does learn a .NET language advise him to grok LINQ (Language Integrated Queries) from A to Z, because its implementation is based on the concept of Monads, which are borrowed from the functional paradigm. It is an open fact that Erik Meijer, the brain behind LINQ, is a double agent from the Haskell world, on a not-so-secret mission to advance the agenda of Monads everywhere. ;) This is the magic behind sending a LINQ expression from a client to a SQL server, and the code actually being executed on the server side. I don't mean like a typical SQL query, where it sends text that needs to be parsed, in this case, it's the fully "ready to execute" representation that gets immediately executed. As others have mentioned you can't go wrong with Python, either, but a fertile young brain should be stretched to the max, and I'd say AT LEAST have him learn Python, AND strongly encourage him to master some functional programming language as well. Some of Python's newest features are also inspired by functional programming, but there's nothing quite like the liberating experience of discovering for yourself that you don't need loops or even variables to program complex algorithms. :) - Publius On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 4:59 PM, Allen <[email protected]> wrote: > this would be my choice, well is after vfp > Al > > -------------------------------------------------- > From: "Paul McNett" <[email protected]> > Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2010 4:12 PM > To: <[email protected]> > Subject: Re: [NF] languages > >> On 6/19/10 7:04 AM, Allen wrote: >>> I have no preconceptions, even though I prefer VFP and use c# so I will >>> pass >>> this on to the lad >> >> C# would seem to be a good language to learn, too. >> >> Paul >> >> > > [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
