On 2007-07-28, Omari Norman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, Jul 23, 2007 at 10:48:10PM -0700, Paul Rubin wrote: > >> If you're having trouble with Python because you're new at >> programming, I can sympathize--I don't think it's the most >> beginner-friendly of languages despite the efforts in that direction >> by the designers. > > Just curious--what language would you recommend as most > beginner-friendly?
I recommend the symbolic logo-like Scheme used in _Simply Scheme_. It works with sentences and words polymorphically. (first smith) s (first '(smith jones cooper)) smith The books exercises revolve around writing functions like pig-latin, reverse, palindrom?, and other word and sentence manipulations. Real Scheme primitives are not introduced until lots of programming ideas have been conveyed. http://www.amazon.com/Simply-Scheme-Introducing-Computer-Science/dp/0262082810 > In college I had a programming course that used C++. Big > mistake in my view, and we didn't learn much in the way of true > principles (in retrospect it would have been nice if they had > us use GCC rather than Borland on Windows.) I can imagine a course using C++ that taught basic programming concepts; it would teach the rudiments of using the STL to start, and work with vectors, lists and maps. See _Accelerated C++_ for a great example. But most C++ courses start with the lowest level functionality of C++, soon embroiling inexperienced programmers with the difficulties of manual dynamic memory management. That's a big side-show. -- Neil Cerutti -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list