> > Oh yes, it does matter. These first exposed to an imperative language > are often having difficulties writing functional-style code. > I wish I coded in Lisp rather than in Fortran in my first years as > a programmer. >
I'm curious what you think here, for someone to be a good mathematician, does it matter what research area they work on (ex. enumerative combinatorics vs. analysis)? I consider this to be an analogous. It's good for one to learn about other languages, but I would say what those languages are doesn't determine their programming ability (now their usefulness/hire-ability are a different story). I do get and agree with the point you're making, the language(s) one learns first can make learning other languages easier. > > I also had to deal with students whose first language > was Matlab, and with students who were first taught a subset of C++... > (e.g. most of the latter had a huge mental trauma as a result :-)) > > I agree with Volker, pure evil (assuming you're not referring to C). Although I wonder how your (math) students (would have) dealt with finite fields, or worse, non-associative rings. :P Best, Travis -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
